TBPN Live - How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, Some Personnel News, Absolute Dawgs, Build that Ego

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - How to Spend A Trillion Dollars (34:00) - Some Personnel News (Brandon Jacobi trade analysis) (52:11) - DM's (Micky put his net worth into $XRP) (01:01:37) - Reply Guy of the Month (@amit_bhalesha) (01:04:10) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are covering Max Meyer's latest edition of Arena Magazine. You've heard us talk about it before. It's one of the most beautiful pieces of literature that you can buy. Quarterly Magazine from Max. If you don't know Max, great guy, great follow on X, some great posts, talks about a lot of different things. Works with Joe Lonsdale at 8VC

and has started publishing this beautiful magazine all about techno-optimism, technology companies, business. Making the moon a state. Everything. He covers tons of stuff

and it's just beautifully, beautifully made. you really have to go and pick one of these up uh he has a deal it's not that expensive i think it's 100 bucks a year 25 bucks a pop and it's something that you could just have on your coffee table and people could leaf through and and it's it's just it's so well and you know what the best thing about this is monetized from day one beautiful ads in the very first edition. See that ramp ad in there? Yeah, fantastic. This ramp ad's great. There's a great levels ad. There's tons of beautiful ads in here, which we love to see. Yeah, this is just a good example of even if you're monetizing through your users, you should still directly via subscription still

run ads, right? I want to see more sub stacks, paid sub stacks running ads. Yeah, exactly. And he said, he said something interesting where he's like kind of building this community of advertisers. I think one third of the tech stack that he uses to build the magazine and run, uh, is, is an active advertiser. So it's kind of like a one hand washes the other uh situation but

there's just a beautiful layout you can just see that you just don't get this in any other magazine it's just it's just very very rare um and it's just so so fun so many interesting pieces it's the same level of i don't know when you were when i was a kid, I subscribed to Popular Science, which these days is probably popular propaganda. But the same level of excitement that I used to get as a kid getting Popular Science in the mail, which was just euphoria, I get this with Arena now. There is one. I have to take one issue with this. It's printed in Canada. Canada?

Canada? Where? Yeah. it's some far off place and so hopefully they can clean that up because i don't know what's that actually feels a little off touch off uh but you wouldn't want it to rub off no no definitely not uh put on some gloves but uh but a ton of a ton of interesting articles in this edition uh they have a whole deep dive on uh rahul who you might know as uh ligma yes the ballad of rahul ligma rahul sonwakar and how he built his company and it goes through his prank at x formerly twitter outside with the box one of the greatest moments in tech history the reaction time on that is incredible and only a real poster could have done that because oftentimes when a news breaks you have 20 30 minutes to

get a banger out yeah and he didn't even just get a banger he got physically got there with a box I had to grab the night before this happened yeah and he was not playing he wasn't talking now it was up the moment woke up and just did just like most most posts are created in the moment and the acting like you can see it on his face that he's just like so sad that he got fired it's so funny and there was a time when that when like these types there's a whole movie about this the it's called like the other guys or something where this this this comedy troupe basically figured out how they could go on the bbc and they would and they would act like they were oil executives and be like yes we're really sorry for what we

did we're giving away 10 billion dollars and the stock would drop and they would get sued they didn't have any money because they're just trolls and it was like amazing and this was like that this was like that level well the the funny thing i remember that happening and i and i knew daniel like i'd met up oh yeah i'd actually funny enough met up with him at erwan once and so watching that unfold live i was like wait this is this is like obviously not real but even a large part of x like didn't know that it was a prank yeah everybody was pranked at once and it took like a while for people to be like wait wait wait wait wait these are posters these are not he was texting me as like as the day went on kind of talking about like hey all these uh journalists

are like hitting me up now to like tell my story we were like do not say anything just like let the meme live you crushed it and it just led to all these incredible meetings i mean here's a picture of him with jensen wong here's a picture of him with elon musk oh it's amazing because they both parlayed that into building like very unique very interesting businesses yeah exactly they didn't get hooked on the stunts they didn't become content creators but um but it's just fantastic and i mean there's a bunch of other cool articles in here. There's one. I mean, look at this. There and back again, celebrating the SpaceX catch. The greatest catch of all time. Fantastic.

Just so nice to see these in print. Then a beautiful ad for Intercom. Nice. And some questions about camping. Yeah, I guess the question is like, if you're running a scale up or even an early stage company, why are you not advertising in this magazine right now? Because it's such a way to signal to the tech elite that you get it and that you're cool. Yeah.

Even if your brand isn't even that cool by itself. Yeah. And it's a really lovely tour of like the new generation of tech founders like nor sadiki's in here for orchid health and and you'll see her and other people mentioned in this in this article also in like the jason carman s3 video series but then now this lives in like the print world as well and there's a few different um kind of like it's almost like the media junket when you're doing like a promotion for a movie you'll of like it's almost like the media junket when you're doing like a promotion for a movie you'll go and you'll do like Jimmy

Kimmel and then Fallon and then Colbert or whatever and the the tech version of that is like you do a Jason Carmen s3 you do you go on to our cash or you go on to a you know some other podcast and then you, you know, write an article for Max in Arena. Yeah. If I, if I was a series A stage founder right now, I'd be trying to get a feature in this magazine at all, at all costs. Cause how do you get in front of a more curated, uh, group of, of people in tech? Yeah. San Francisco strikes back and just like wonderful layout, wonderful to look at. Open source defense capital, mission to Europa, just beautiful.

I love this. I'm excited to read through this more. I just received it in the mail two days ago. But we wanted to do a deep dive today on kind of the lead hero piece of this edition. And did you read the actual letter from the editor where Max writes America Punk, the whole thesis of this particular edition?

The second page. So the first page is Max introducing the corporation name, a message from the president of the Intergalactic media corporation of america very bullish on making humanity multi-planetary um but what i found interesting was his article on america punk just this idea that that you can wind up and this really struck a chord with me because his basic thesis is like is like good things are good but it's sometimes boring to say that and so he kind of walks through like capitalism is good for a bunch

of reasons it's lifted two billion people out of subsistence poverty and it's the greatest engine for human flourishing since we've captured fire um and people will say oh no that's bad going to space will be very expensive the idea of of learning is racist. Western medicine is racist. And so there's these wars between like, you know, bad things are good, good things are good. But at a certain point, it becomes boring to just say good things are good. It's boring, like really boring. It's a tautology. It's what your dad believes. And once you admit that good things are good, then you have to spend your time making and defending good things, which is hard because good things are often well it's funny because it actually became counter-cultural to be like no capitalism is amazing right like i feel like uh as a 28 year

old i grew up in a school system in which the teachers which ironically the american public school system the teachers were saying like here's all the issues with capitalism and like really fixating on the issues, not talking about the advancements in medicine, education, housing, all these different things that have allowed for human flourishing. Yeah, and so Max argues that, but even if defending good things isn't very interesting, it's still important.

And so good things need to be made cool again. America needs to be made punk. America needs America punk. And so as one of the world's best things, America has a problem. It's currently very boring to defend America. As of now, supporting America means your dad waving a flag on the 4th of July, your mom scolding you to be more grateful at dinner. Defending America means a solemn forced flag day

singing in elementary school. But if you wanted to defend America in a cool way, how would you go about doing it? And his answer is that you'd celebrate rebelliousness, the spirit that made the country. There's nothing cooler than a rebellion and that's America punk. And so he wants to separate it

from these visions of the future that are like steampunk, cyberpunk, atom punk that are too narrow around a particular technology and refocus on the spirit of the American people, which I think is very, very interesting. So grab a flag in a magazine, tell your friends to join the party, because if good things are good, then defending good things is better together. And then he says, thanks. Well said.

And it's just a very, yeah, it is an interesting thing that like techno-optimism has become consensus. There's this idea that, you know, everyone is posting like, oh, the next four years are going to be amazing, unbridled techno-capitalism. I mean, that is very much a, we are in somewhat of a bubble, even though it overlaps with the real world. But we still need to continue doing it, even though it's mainstream within technology now. Yeah. But there's something about like when you're, when you're on top of the world and you're, you know, just winning and it's very consensus, like there's nowhere to go but down and that's very risky. So I think he's, he's right to identify that, um, we need to think deeper about what like rah, rah technology actually means yeah which i think it's good that

he's thinking now instead of well a year when people are like oh yeah it's boring like i'm not into this i'm not motivated by this yeah and that ties into joe's piece though which is it's not enough to just be excited about technology you actually need to and i think a lot of our uh a lot of the technology beaners out there are starting to realize that uh there is uh you sort of can reach a level of impact in the private markets and then to have the next order you know of magnitude of impact you need to get involved with government yep because it's a huge huge critical aspect of our society and and the people that run the government and the decisions that they make have a massive impact on our on our quality of life um and so many different systems from mental health

institutions and this is a massive this is a massive shift from a decade ago where balaji gave that talk at y combinator called silicon valley's ultimate exit are you familiar with this so there's this i i forget what his name is there's some philosopher and he basically said like when you're when you're living within a society that has a particular government you have a few options uh voice exit and something else i'm blanking yeah all this but um but basically it's like you can stay and fight and try and reform the government or you can leave yeah and balaji was part of the you know libertarian crew that was like let's go to maybe new zealand let's do sea setting let's do ice setting let's let's do uh you know interplanetary colonization let's leave

because things are so broken we can't fix it and that was the dominant thesis of most silicon valley elites for a long time yeah and only recently i feel like people have shifted no i i during my personal uh sort of personal anecdote here during covid living in la things were getting so dark yeah uh i mean it sounds silly saying this but like they couldn't they didn't let you go to the beach. You really basically couldn't be outside. It was crazy. I was like, why am I living in California if I can't go outdoors and be away from people? And Joe left California during that time. So, and I, and I got very caught up in that. Like my, my experience in like April of 2020 was like on Zillow looking at property in

Austin and Miami and getting very caught up in that. And fortunately, I decided to stay in California and sort of like try to have a small impact. So I, and that ended up having being like, you know, I ended up backing like a city councilwoman who had came in and made a tremendous impact on the West side, right. Ended recently uh supported uh our new da hawkman who is uh you know gonna do it have an incredible impact sort of cleaning up the city making crime illegal again doing things like that um and so i decided to say like no i was born and raised in california i'm staying here i'm gonna make it better even in small ways and if people with agency just decide to leave things will just get

worse and worse and worse it's Albert Hirschman exit voice and loyalty so you can leave the government that you're under you can have a voice and try and change the government or you can just be loyal to the government and I think no one in tech wants to do the last one that's why I couldn't even think of it

no one's advocating for that. But it is interesting that Joe went through a period of exit with regard to California, but has chosen to opt for voice within the confines of America. Well, it's also he didn't exit the United States. Yeah, yeah. He didn't exit the United States. And he started whatever, University of Texas,

or what's the name of it? University of Austin. University of Austin, which is like, hey, we actually need to, you know, create these sort of like hideouts where we can build the movement without, you know. So you can think of them as kind of like long America, short California, which is like a totally reasonable trade. And so this is fascinating because, you know, you think of him as like, you know, Palantir, like almost PayPal mafia-esque guy, very libertarian. And yet he's writing this article that's literally called How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. And so you, you know, the,

the drumbeat of the technologist and the libertarian for so long was just spend less, spend less, spend less. And he's completely reframing this thought experiment to say what happens if you get a dozen top entrepreneurs in the United States together and just ask them how would you spend a trillion dollars. He's not talking about buying artwork or planes, the type of things lottery winners might spend a new fortune on. Rather, how would they spend public money

to strengthen the future of American society and suppose further that you could skip the red tape, how would it be different than the way we currently spend trillions? And so he breaks this down into nine parts. And I love all of these. They're very pragmatic, but they're also very techno optimistic. And it's just a fascinating tour of all the different problems in America right now and how you could go about solving them if you were very aggressive with the spending, but also very like laser focused. So the first proposal he has is for $200 billion.

The small price of $200 billion. Crushed traffic and the cost of living in our 50 largest metropolitan areas. And so his argument here is that the average traffic, the annual cost of traffic congestion in Texas has reached over $1,000 per commuter in wasted fuel and time, with the average commuter losing 54 hours

in traffic each year. And LA residents, as you well know, lose over 80 hours in traffic per year. For you, it's probably 80 hours a month. 80 hours a month. No, for me, I wouldn't say i lost it because i'm either doing deals or listening to founders podcasts right there's no it's all about frame of mind yeah yeah frame of mind but uh or or charging ten thousand dollars an hour on intro

yeah so if you're making money while you're on the call then you're good um yeah but basically you know he's saying los angeles can't build a subway tunnel for less than a billion dollars per mile. How could $200 billion meaningfully improve 50 cities? The answer is competence. I once wrote the mayor of Austin about new technology with proven economics, tunneling. And so he's advocating for building more tunnels, most likely through the Boring Company. So the Boring Company is like that sleeper company in the musk portfolio that everyone hates it dude if you go on youtube and you search like boring company

update it's just all of these communists posting videos of elon musk with a clown nose on and they're like it's not working it's not working and it's like you don't realize that you're giving him the attention like you could have made those same videos about tesla for 10 years when they like were barely shipping any cars yeah it's like you don't understand how this works like he spends 20 years on something and then all of a sudden it's like fuck there are tunnels everywhere like there may be too many tunnels yeah it's like most people would say like there's too many teslas out there now yeah so my my uh my roommate uh worked for the boring company yeah uh my roommate the first year i lived in in la out of. And yeah, he ended up moving to Vegas

because that was like where they could get a deal done. And they're building out a bunch of tunnels there. So I'm excited. I mean, that'll be- And people love to harp on, oh, the tunnel got some water in it. It's flooding, it's failed. And it's like, maybe, maybe not.

Maybe he'll just keep working on it and he'll just fund it forever until it works. And, but the very like fundamental, like economic physics like the laws of physics around the project to me are just so obvious because it's like you have a a resource which is essentially land underneath cities that's extremely valuable that no one has access to yeah so you can get access to it that's incredibly valuable yeah, there's way less laws if you go 100 feet underground than above ground where it takes a billion dollars to make a mile of track because there's so much regulatory burden and approvals needed. person's property for some egregious price because like you know 10 square feet of it like touch where the track would be yeah all that kind of stuff so just the the solution is just like go

underground and i think there was this there was a there was a change in the law where you used to if you bought property you used to own like technically essentially everything from the core to the earth all the way to the sky yeah and then eventually they said no there is a cap so planes can fly over you and stuff and and they did that underground it used to be that if you owned a piece of land you could pull as much water from the aquifer below you as you wanted yep and now everybody's like no this is actually a shared resource like you you can't just pull as much as you want well have you ever been on the red line out to harvard in boston or cambridge it's the craziest thing so you're on this train that's just going straight like subway it just works really well and then all of a sudden it slows

down and starts screeching as you're pulling into harvard and the reason is because in 1776 or something nice george washington wrote a letter to Harvard and said, I am granting you this land permanently no matter what cannot be revoked under any circumstances. And so they own the land like forever and all the way to the core still. They have some like different definition of what real estate means for them. And so when the subway came, they were just like, no, which is really stupid because it would have been so much better for everyone if they'd just been like, yes. Cell phone. But, but, but yeah, it like, it like screeches around the corner to get there. Crazy.

Because they were like, no, like you can't, you can't dig under us. Yeah, that's our dirt. We own everything. Yeah. And, and, and our proof is a letter from George Washington. Yeah. Like, because they were there before the country. It's older than the country, I'm pretty sure. I think it's like 1600. It's crazy. So

Joe maps out a couple more stats. He says, while saving over 90% versus above ground infrastructure with costs of a single tunnel about 10 million per mile. Adding a second direction in some places as well as stations and egress about every mile brings the total cost to $25 million per mile. In 2020, we mapped out a sample Austin system for $1 billion connecting the airport, several downtown locations, and the Q2 soccer stadium. The project has more connections than the proposed $5 billion above-ground rail line at a fifth of the cost. For $5 billion, it connects a much larger area.

Yeah, and the interesting thing with tunnels is it's actually like a very good fit for like robo taxis because it's such a more controlled environment. You're not going to have like a dog run through the tunnel or like some kid come out of school and run out or like cars doing crazy stuff. Yeah, like the current Tesla like full self-driving system could easily do that, no problem. And is, like that's kind of what's what's happening in the yeah and and every time you think that uh like I would love to see like the Walt Disney had his like you know master plan multi-year of like how all of his

companies interact like I'm sure Elon has his version of that he's like we're building the robo taxis which will be be ready when all of my tunnel networks come online. And then every 50% of people that move in the United States will be in one of our tunnels or one of our cars or both at the same time. It really is just like Musk Inc., 100%. So let's go to number two.

Joe Lonsdale says, for $100 billion, take back our prison system from incompetent bureaucrats. He says, America has two forms of Stockholm Syndrome in its approach to criminal justice.

Coming from the extremist left, there is a desire to coddle violent criminals and allow repeat victimization in the name of social justice. But across the political spectrum, there's another problem, the total capture

of the prison system by bureaucrats, unions, and corporations whose incompetence we tolerate. Speaking of Stockholm, when the American criminologist Francis Cullen won the Swedish government Stockholm Prize, he proposed to spend $10 billion in new prisons. His framework was as follows. Ten prisons will be developed, each funded at $1 billion each. The competition of proposals would be undertaken in which states would partner with criminologists and prison experts from around the world, as well as from

private enterprises to set forth a model for prisons. Each prison proposal must be shown to a rational scientific and to nourish the development of prisoners. In each proposed prison, each prisoner must be engaged every day in activity, education, work, or treatment, and there would be ongoing process and outcome evaluation by a team of researchers. The Cullen framework is a fine start, but if a bit idealistic, not all prisoners need to be nourished. Some are hardened killers to be locked away, but approximately 600,000 people leave prison each year, and an estimated 95% of prisoners will eventually return to our society. Yeah yeah this segment on like paying for there's been a few well yeah paying for performance like almost like recruiter style where if you work with a recruiter in tech

and they don't find you anyone good and you don't hire anyone you don't really you know maybe you pay a little bit like a small retainer but you don't pay much and the same concept is is being has been applied it was applied in he talks about how it was applied in Arizona, where the state allowed county governments to collect up to 40% of the cost savings to the state when fewer people under their parole and probation supervision went back to prison. And so that incentive just allowed, made the institutions actually care about, care about the long-term outcomes of their prisoners which i think is fantastic palmer lucky actually said that he was thinking about doing

uh private prisons before starting andrew and andrew was just like a much bigger much more important yeah job but yeah but we thought that there was interesting yeah and it is crazy that he i mean he mentioned that like maybe five years ago I'm surprised that no one's run with it and we haven't seen like a venture backed prison startup, but that sounds like a task for Wilmanitis. Probably. Uh, well, and Fio can do that before their next, their next big one. Yeah. I mean like if you, if Palmer's throwing out ideas like that, you would think, but it's not enough to just say like, Oh, Palmer like validated the idea. So I'm running with it. Like it's not enough to just say like oh palmer like validated the idea so i'm running with it like it's clearly it takes a very special person to be able to do that and thread the needle yeah yeah the and also it's just you know how i'm sure it's a very rough like industry to work in like my mom was a nurse in prisons and it like it's just brutal at every level like from like

the sheriff department like while she was there i think the sheriff like went to prison because yeah he was like super corrupt like well what about all those there were a handful of tech elite that went to prison because they were paying to get their kids into schools and so we need to go after those people who like experience the prison system and be like hey like let's make a change here martha stewart you understand you understand the product right like let's like makes this better but you know when people will will post a picture of like a nordic prison oh yeah like it'll they'll try to like critique it and be like look how nice this prison is like uh like i'm sure that people just want to go to prison it's like nobody wants their freedom taken away we our prisons should be places that allow

in general like there's people that are too far gone. I strongly believe that that just need to be locked up forever. Like they just, you know, didn't fail the test. Like you, you know, you should be gone. But then there's this whole contingent of people that obviously should be in an environment that is conducive to personal growth, to learning, to even just being in a mental state that allows them to think more positively about life right and like build their self-esteem back up because um you know going and being thrown in effectively a dungeon is not going to be conducive to um the mindset that you want those people when they are those 600 000 people that are released every year uh you want them to

be in a mindset where they don't hate the system, right? Because then they're just going to continue to rebel. I wonder what Martin Scully thinks about prison reform. I bet he would have some very interesting takes. He talked about, at Hereticon, he talked a bit about his experience in prison and why you have Diddy and SBF in the same prison in Brooklyn.

But longer conversation there. Yeah, let's move on to part three. Joe says, for $100 billion, build 21st century mental health institutions. So very related to the previous point. We'll read the lead in here. At the peak of institutionalization in 1955, nearly half a million people in the United States were in mental hospitals. The 1962 book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the movie two dramatically changed how Americans viewed that system. And not totally without reason, the system

had obvious defects and needed reforms. But generations later, after we ended nearly all institutionalization, we have a serious crisis in our society. Many people with serious but treatable mental illnesses that would have benefited from institutionalization have been left to prison and the street. So this was the thing that stood out here. This guy, Christopher Ruffo,

found that in his home state of Washington, the per capita number of state mental health hospital beds had declined by over 90 since the 60s and anybody who's been out in the real world like would would probably guess that like our mental health issues have not sort of reduced by 90 and you can see that on the streets. And, you know, I know I was talking to a CEO that like a very successful like founder CEO talking about his, you know, family's like battles with, you know, bipolar and how alone you feel when you're dealing with that because there's no it's literally like it is 100 on the family to provide that level of care and there's almost like no quality resources that can help kind of like address that it's incredibly uh challenging to deal with that's interesting because at least in california there's this story that might be somewhat apocryphal that like

all of the mental health institution closures are due to Ronald Reagan. Um, and I'm not sure how true that is. I'm sure it was like a process, but, um, it's fascinating because it it's, it's actually a very libertarian and, and, and somewhat right wing philosophy. But if you look on a political compass, there's like left wing libert libertarianism, right-wing libertarianism. They're kind of two different things culturally. But there is a libertarian argument to say, you know what? Keep the government out of everything. Keep the government out of my mind.

Keep the government out of what I do. If I want to sleep on the street, that should be my freedom. But the argument that I've heard that's much better and much more convincing to me is that, no, like as a society, we have a duty to step in and help people who are suffering. And, and it is unacceptable to let someone do drugs to death on the street. And we have a moral duty to step in, even if that does have a little bit more of an authoritarian bent relative to the libertarian, like you can just do whatever you want, but it's odd that like the libertarian position has kind of been adopted by the left to some degree because you would normally think that of someone who's like well no i don't want my tax dollars going to a mental institution and no if i go crazy i want to be able to do whatever i want like stay

out of it right that's kind of a that's kind of a libertarian position and yet it's become like the standard on the left very oddly yeah which is why i mean i think this entire piece is is a very interesting perspective from joe who's very libertarian exactly general to just like take an opinion of like okay like i'll you know run this exercise of how you might because the money's going to get spent yeah one way or another yep it's like a venture-backed startup like if you raise like the united states raises like five six trillion dollars a year like they're going to spend the money yeah yeah um let's go to number four uh number proposal number four is for 50 billion dollars uh you can make our our inner cities a place where children thrive lonsdale endorses uh brad gerstner's idea to give every american child

oh whoops that's the wrong one. Lonsdale proposes spending $50 billion to replicate successful community programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. I hadn't heard about HCZ. Have you heard about this? No. Because it's funded by Jeffrey Canada and Ken Langone and Stanley Druckenmiller. And it covers an area of 100 blocks in Harlem. And apparently, it's been remarkably successful and very, very high ROI. And so his argument is just like, we need to scale this, the one program that's actually working, basically just like put more wood behind fewer arrows. Confronting issues directly, such as a need for male role models and addressing maternal drug use. The program has significantly

improved test scores and future income prospects for participating children. And there was some stat in here about, yeah, I love this one. The benefits to the public are enormous. Converting a high school dropout to a high school graduate is worth more than $250,000 in public costs over a lifetime. So like hugely, this is exactly like where the government should be investing. So I love that. Scaling such models would involve rewarding programs that achieve measurable positive outcomes, aiming to reduce intergenerational poverty and creating environments where children can succeed. Love it. Those are some great pictures from the Harlem Children's Zone. Step five is for $100 billion, give every American child a stake in our economic future.

Yeah, so this has been something that Brad over at Altimeter has been talking about for years and is actually making some substantial moves on because it's really not that great of an investment to give every new child in America $1 thousand dollars in an index fund the day that they're born okay and over time you know through compounding it'll become like a very meaningful amount of money that would help them buy their first home pay for college and teach them about the power of compounding growth which we understand here on this podcast because we went from zero to

a thousand yes followers on on x in you know a few weeks and we're going to get to that second you know thousand follower mark two thousand you know in about seven days so uh people like the more that we can educate the youth in this country on compounding growth and be able to not just like learn about it, but experience it directly. I think that'll be very powerful. Yeah. It is really hard to get hooked on long-term compounding growth. Like it's so easy to experience the euphoria of buying a lottery ticket. Like I still remember the day I bought my first lottery ticket and I was like, I'm going to win. This is happening for me. It was the only lottery ticket I ever bought. But for that like week while I was waiting for the numbers to come up, I was like completely

delusional. And I was like, of course I'm not going to win. Like this is so stupid. I should never do this. But, but it's very hard for something that grows slowly. So imagine if like over the first 10 years of your life, you're just watching this account go up and up and up. And you're just like not being able to touch it. Exactly. Exactly. Because like the other thing is psychologically at a very young age. We're we're you know, we obviously love bubbles and speculation and, you know, being risk on. But kids are getting exposed to meme coins in like middle school. I know. Which is like an unregulated lottery. Yeah. Like they you have to be 18 to buy a lottery ticket. Right.

Yeah. So these kids are able to go in middle school buy solana meme coins and you know they think they're going to turn 17 into three million dollars like that guy did with with peanut but uh it's teaching this sort of like uh experience of instant gratification and low effort for potentially extreme roi but it's basically just encouraging, you know, gambling or lottery ticket buying. So it's a big issue. Uh, step six in Joe's plan is for $50 billion, restore the American industrial skill base. Yeah. So this, this, this, um, this reminded me a few episodes ago, I was talking about a guy that I use for like handyman stuff. He was telling me like,

Oh, I'm learning how to like build websites. And I told him, I was like, that's great. But like you realize there's, there's infinite other things that you could do that you're probably already like more competent in that.

If you just really specialize, you could make a very meaningful, like six figure income and have like very little competition in doing that. We don't need people that we don't need more people that know how to build websites, right? We need more people that know how to do like, you know, I think somewhere in this article, the example is tooling engineers. So he opens with Apple CEO Tim Cook once remarked in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room in China, you could fill multiple football fields tooling engineers, and I'm not sure we could fill the room.

In China, you could fill multiple football fields. And this is why they're kicking our ass on iPhone and electronics manufacturing. Just manufacturing broadly. Because there's so many integrated parts and there's so many little CNC engineers, all sorts of little tools that need to be made and the tools that make the tools. There's like 20 layers deep in the supply chain.

And we've just lost so much of that. Yeah. And I think we're in this amazing moment in time where we have like a bunch of friends of the podcast that are building, you know, people like Aaron, the DRAC kid, forget his name. Phil, right? So people like Aaron and Phil that are building manufacturing company here in the US, Hadrian, Deterrence, so many important companies. But what they're going to run into, like a big challenge is not even just making these new manufacturing systems, but is a talent thing, right? Like, how do you actually find people that are qualified? And a lot of these companies will end up in a place where they're like, we have open roles that are all six-figure jobs and we don't know where to find these people right and it's actually good for the people that do know how to do it but a lot of those people are retiring right they're not we need a new influx of manufacturing talent and uh these are very like they are jobs

that require you to like use your hands and use your body, but they're jobs that will give people real dignity over going and working at Chipotle, you know, or going and working in the McDonald's drive through because you're being very productive. You're like producing things that matter, not just producing junk food. And, um, there are some risks. Have you heard of the Sonoran desert institute sdi have you ever heard of this no okay so uh it's a very popular sponsor on gun youtube

so gun reviewing youtube they often say if you're interested in getting into like the manufacturing gunsmithing you should go to the sonoran desert institute which is an online college blew up during covid and they teach you you the basics of how to use machinery and use tooling to become a gunsmith and work in the arms industry. Very cool idea. And the economic model works very well for them because they're GI Bill compliant. And so if you come back from the military and you have GI Bill dollars that you could put towards college, you can put that towards SDI. Now, there was a bunch of criticism recently about SDI not actually driving better outcomes and kind of just giving you like very basic high level stuff.

Well, it's tough because like gunsmithing is such a, you need to do, like a lot of these things like are better suited for an apprentice model. So I want to see trade schools that have government incentives that then feed you into apprentice programs. And people, like i always tell you know i told you know my handyman uh buddy i'm like go find somebody who's very talented at one

specific thing and offer to work for them for thirty thousand dollars a year and do 12-hour days and do that for two years and you'll come out of that being close to an expert right like you'll learn enough during that period so Yeah, so Joe's solution here, he points to Texas in 2014. They aligned incentives and funding for its technical colleges and started paying the schools based on how much the student earned.

They can fake graduation rates. They can fake teaching skills, but they cannot fake the results income. This approach resulted in a doubling of the total amount of money being made by students in just six years. Money that goes back into Texas through local taxes. When bureaucrats have a strong financial incentive to deliver better results, they will. And I love that. Yeah. I think there's a lot of, you know, just like there was an explosion of like effectively

trade schools for software engineering, the same exact thing. You could do that for machining, plumbing, electrical work um all those sort of like you know specialized categories so let's go to number seven for 200 billion dollars one of the bigger ideas create better funders of science in america lonsdale proposes allocating 200 billion dollars over 10 years to establish new competitive funding bodies for scientific research challenging the dominance of institutions like the National Institute of Health. He argues that the NIH has become risk-averse and bureaucratic, often stifling innovation

by creating alternative organizations that reward high-risk, high-reward research and empower young scientists. The U.S. can invigorate scientific progress. This is something we were just talking about in that group chat. Yeah, I think venture capital has stepped in here to some degree because they'll be like you know the um the long journey team will like find give some like researcher basically like 200k to two

cap to be like just work on this like weird idea for a couple years and that's like cool and we need that like that's risk capital but our government should also be giving like basically risk capital yep to like important sort of scientific scientific pursuits it goes to that discussion we were having in that group chat about like invention versus discovery just this idea that you know some of the biggest breakthroughs in in science have been more discoveries than inventions not very diligent it wasn't like really us working at something. Like lizard venom. Yeah, lizard venom is a good example. With ozempic. But even penicillin, I think it's this,

our friends are referring to it as the gentleman scientist, the person who's just experimenting and testing things and then just locks upon something really, really remarkable. So many important discoveries. And it's very hard to facilitate that these days in the traditional academic institutions or the typical tracks where it's like, there's a certain amount of time

you have to publish a paper, you have to get this many reviews and this many citations, and it's become too rigid. And so he definitely wants to pull it back from that. So one thing that he suggests is saying that a public scientific funder would be filling in and funding research gaps where innovation isn't profitable yep um and so

there's so many uh there's so many drugs that potentially have impact in like areas that they weren't initially like approved for that are non-profitable to fund research in because you might have to spend 2020, $50 million proving out that something works, and then it's a generic drug. So there's no margin to be made or edge or IP that you can create. And so there's so many different areas where that applies.

And honestly, it's oftentimes bro scientists that are doing this research on themselves. In many ways, Brian Johnson is doing a lot of this on himself where he's just like i'm gonna spend millions of dollars like figuring out how to sleep like five percent better because that's gonna deliver like some of the some of the greatest i mean we're seeing this all over the place where i think gorn is probably one of the most respected like researchers on stimulants uh josie zaner developed like her own vaccines during covid and was like testing stuff on herself it's crazy uh and then uh ayla has like one of the most

she has one of the largest data sets on like sex related social science yeah can can put out research that's like way way more robust than anything you'd see yeah so there's this weird uh there's this weird model shifting to just like these independent researchers. But yeah, I mean, I think Joe is, hopefully, it seems like he's optimistic about retooling some of the funding that does come from the government

to drive innovation within these organizations. But let's go to number eight. He says, for $100 billion, upend the energy future and put de-growthers out of business. And his argument is that if you invest $100 billion to revolutionize the energy sector by promoting abundant clean energy production, particularly through nuclear power

and carbon capture technologies, he criticizes the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's obstructive processes and advocates for its reform. And I've heard this so much from all the nuclear folks that there are like when you're getting a new reactor design approved, you have to have an actual hearing for things that are completely uncontested. Yeah. Yeah. There's, um, they had a funny quote in here where the, uh, NRNRC was, was bragging and they said the 12,000 page application took less than 42 months to review. Can you imagine being the guy like building something and put together this like 12,000 page application that probably like could have been, it probably could have been an email, you know, and then you wait 42 months, uh, you know,

just to figure out if, if, if like you're good to go. Yeah. Um, that is just like criminal in my opinion. Um, and, uh, and he includes this incredible graph here of the, uh, the cumulative nuclear construction permits and operational plants over time. And you can just see that after the seventies, the number of new operational plants just completely flat lines. And there's just no new development. And I think it has started to tick up again, but it's, it's nowhere near like the, the asymptotic curve that we thought we'd be on with energy too cheap to meter so very

very very depressing but hopefully there can be um you know uh really significant overhaul of the nrc um joe advocates for starting by abolishing the nrc's awful incentive structure conceived as a cost-saving measure but which has backfired awfully congress forces the nrc to fund its budget through fees paid hourly by the very companies it regulates not unlike a law firm or consultancy if you were funded to regulate by the hour how long would you take it's like the worst possible incentive same thing with like the cost plus model within defense yeah very very bad if you're getting paid based on how much something costs like you run up the costs yep and let's go to number nine personal favorite billion dollars give back the rest of the money in his final proposal lonsdale recommends returning the remaining 100 billion to the

american people emphasizing the value of individual liberty and economic freedom he believes that citizens are better equipped than central planners to allocate resources efficiently by giving the money back perhaps through tax rebates or direct payments. Individuals can make their own choices, stimulating economic growth and just demonstrating trust in the populace. Yeah, so he positions this very well, which more people should understand, is that when the federal government does things like a quote-unquote stimulus check, they position it as a payment or a tax rebate. And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place, They position it as a payment or a tax rebate.

And that effectively implies that the money was never yours in the first place. But it was. It was your money that the government effectively took from the citizens and the businesses, institutions in our country. And I think that the government should position that more of like, hey, we're giving you back. We sort of overtaxed. It's your money. I always like to joke that. Spend it how you wish. Did you know that every single year,

the United States government collects enough money in tax revenue to give every single citizen a 100% tax rebate? Is that? They could give every single person 100% off their taxes, but they keep all the money for all these projects. It's just, it's just a total, it's just a tautology because obviously whatever they take from you, they could give back. But it sounds shocking. It sounds like one of those, one of those stats that's like, Oh, you know, if they could give everyone a million dollars, but no, it's really,

it's really like whatever they taking, they could just give back. But so they have to justify what they're giving and it has to make sense. And I think he has some great proposals there. Yeah, people don't realize that income tax was illegal for a while in U.S. history, right? It was something that the founding fathers were very against and the foundation of the country in many ways because it was us telling the Brits,

hey, look, we don't like these taxes. Let's end this. Yeah, we've kind like wound up with such a hodgepodge of like corporate taxes income taxes there's taxes on all over the place and people wind up moving around the country to find like their optimal blend but a blend i think i think it's the most interesting thing with this is definitely to close on is that there's a shift from just burn it all down, stop everything, to let's be more efficient with the money. Yeah, and I honestly like that. I think Balaji. It's more incremental. Balaji's consistently had extremely interesting ideas and been right on a lot of stuff.

Yep. interested in ideas and been right on a lot of stuff. And the area that I just strongly disagree with him on is he's like very like pro like exit, like let's just leave and like rebuild from the ground up. And I think that experiments like that should be run at the same time. We want the best and brightest in America to be focused on how do we make this place a better place for everyone. Exactly. So it's a great movement.

I love it. Well, thanks to Max for publishing that in Arena Magazine. You can go pick it up and give him a follow because it's a fantastic publication.

Subscribe to the magazine. Subscribe to the magazine. Before we dive in, should we indulge in a beverage? Yeah, sure. Gotta always have a bunch of... Oh, and thank you

to Enchilada's Surfboarders. We received some beautiful koozies that we're enjoying very much. They're certified for milk only, but we're drinking Celsius in them. Yeah. Hopefully it works. How do I do this? Today we have organic coconuts.

We always – let's see. It's a product of Thailand, so it came off the boat. I like that they send it in the Nature's packaging. Do I pull this off? No, you pull that off, and then you go like that, so you break it, and then you can pull this little thing off. Okay. Pull off the top, and then you got a little straw here,

a little microplastics. Take this off, and we record for many hours here in the studio, so it's good to have a little. We're like endurance athletes that need a little sugar boost in the studio. So it's good to have a little... We're like endurance athletes that need a little sugar boost along the way. So these are delicious. I think I got a little coconut meat in mine. Me too.

I'm pretty jammed up. Jammed up, but we'll make it work. And thank you to Melissa's Organic Coconuts. Okay, now it's going. That's good. Delicious. Delicious. I love that. Do we, I think we have some- Let's go to some DMs. Do we have some personnel news? Oh yeah. So we have a new segment on the show, Some Personnel News, where we are tracking the

biggest moves, the biggest pickups, who's entering free agency, who's getting long contracts in tech. And our first deal or move of this show is? Yeah, I mean, this is this is breaking news in the tech world, folks, we have a major move happening. And it's shaking things up as we speak. Brandon Jacoby. Yes, that Brandon Jacoby, former product designer at Square and Cash App. The guy who's had his fingerprints on products used by millions of people is officially making the leap. And after an absolutely electric stint as a first hire at Party Round, where he built a product that was the talk of the town, Brandon Jacoby is now joining, you heard it here, second X. You heard it first on X.

That's right. X just landed an absolute stud. And I think it's worth telling you a little bit about Brandon Jacoby. This guy is a grinder. We're talking 20-hour days in Figma every single day. If it's 1 a.m., if it's 4 a.m., Brandon is there, locked in, pixel perfect, making magic happen. Nobody, and I mean mean nobody knows their way around figma better than this guy his taste impeccable attention to detail unmatched low ego high output

we're talking about a technician a craftsman a relentless perfectionist an absolute dog an absolute dog so what does this mean for x well they're bringing in a player who doesn't just make products. He makes phenomenal products. He's been in the big leagues building for millions of users, and now he's suiting up to take X's game to the next level. This isn't just a hire. This is a franchise altering move. An absolute dog by every definition. Watch out tech world. Brandon Jacoby's coming and he's ready to dominate. You have any details on the contract? Yeah, I mean, he's an absolute dog. I think, you know, the deals weren't released, or the details weren't released of this deal,

but you probably think it's a four-year deal, maybe one-year cliff. Seven, eight figures. Big, big deal for him. I mean, just look at the stats he's picked up. Former Rookie of the Year contender, potential future Hall of Famer, pushed millions of pixels every year in day in day out uh extremely technical extremely detail oriented and i'm really excited to see what he does this season he's coming to a platform that uh we all use and love love it's the foundation of this podcast and our

you know livelihoods and we're excited to get this level of talent uh working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day so thank you to brandon of talent working on the product that we spend hours in that feed every single day. So thank you to Brandon for this move. And congrats to Axel on the pickup. Big pickup. Big pickup. That's great. Let's go to some Q&A. We got a DM. We got a question from Mickey with the blicky. He says, hey guys, VC Mickey here. I got some great advice last week about angel investing and starting small. I decided to take your advice and basically put my entire net worth into XRP. It's now up almost 80% over the last week. Can you guys offer any tips for risk management? Man, my only advice here would be rotate out of that. Is this real? Did XRP really moon? I can't tell if he's joking, but I love it.

I love the... It's up 100 percent. Here we go. I love that risk on attitude. Here's what I would say. If I were Mickey, I'd be rotating into other risk assets like early stage startups. got something like xrp that's moving a hundred percent a week get into something that's illiquid get into something that's marked on maybe like an annual basis something like a seed stage startup uh just so you can go focus on other things right um a lot of people get caught up into day-to-day price action with crypto and that can be a huge distraction from actually creating enterprise value in your job, in your company. And so anyways, get into something illiquid, lock it up, lock in the gains. I like that.

And go long. Yeah, good luck out there. Our next DM comes from an anonymous poster who writes in, hey, do you have some time to enlighten me on your experience with creating a consumer packaged goods company? How did you validate the market? I have a group of talented individuals that hit me up about an idea I shared publicly, and I'm evaluating taking next steps. What do you think? How do you validate the market for a consumer packaged goods company? I've been through this

a few different times, and I kind of broke it down as there's two different ways. One is kind of the Brian Johnson way. You start talking about the idea and the problem that you want to solve extremely publicly, become the face of that problem. So for him, it's longevity. For Jocko, it's performance in the gym, this like athletic militaristic style. And then that fan base will, will buy kind of anything from you. The other is more product led, more product driven, where you're doing real R and D locking up a supply chain, kind of like what the Ridge wallets did. A lot of our early stuff at Lucy

was around like FDA applications, patents, stuff like that. It took a long time to get it going. We weren't the face of nicotine. Yeah. And to some degree, we still aren't, but we have like a very narrow set. You're kind of the face of nicotine. Yeah. But it came later. Yeah. But it did come later. It wasn't like we, we, we, we, we, we went like, you know, influencer or brand first, and then kind of were able to sell a commoditized product. We had to do something unique. So I think a lot of it's like, well, what's your edge in this product? Can you be like an operational beast and then grow slowly? But what do you think? Another example. So launching Rora water filters

actually tomorrow. That's an example of validating that opportunity was looking at the market. You know, consumers are already spending billions of dollars on water filters. So it wasn't a question of do people buy water filters or are they going to want one? And so what we did with that is we took a popular water filter called the Berkey and we looked at it and we said, how can we make this better on 10 different dimensions? So we made it way, way, way more effective. We went and did the hard work of getting it proved out that it actually works. And then we made the design better, the usability better, all these different things that we knew consumers cared about.

And so we've spent somewhere in the seven figure mark on testing and R&D to get the product where it is today. But we know that the product is going to be a hit because we took something that was already out there that consumers liked generally, and we made it dramatically better. And so I think if you're, um, most consumer products, uh, you know, a friend of the podcast, John Fio has made products over the years that were like first of a kind, something like he made like the gravity blanket and something like that's much more binary of like people weren't really buying weighted blankets like they weren't really a thing until he created it um but a lot of consumer products are like you know even you know looking at this on the table it's not like people were already buying coconut water it was like hey can we sell them the same product just like in the in

the original packaging basically one of my favorite stories from fio is uh when he when he launched the moon pod which is a uh it's basically like a big bean bag but it's even bigger and softer he realized that he he shot some video of i think it was like a woman falling backwards and getting caught by the bag and just like falling into this really comfy bag in slow motion. And that one asset probably drove like a hundred million dollars in sales on Facebook. And he just knew that like, that it was just a few frames. It was like, it was like almost like an animated GIF and it was, you know, a few seconds and it just stopped you in the feed. And so having that, like, what is the hook? What is this one thing? So there's a bunch of different

ways, but to, to validate the market, it can be like, it is the hook? What is this one thing? So there's a bunch of different ways, but to validate the market, it can be like, it's so big and so obvious and you have some innovation or you're so charismatic and you're this, you know, heroic influencer who's gonna have millions of fans buying whatever you sell, or you have some hook that you just know will go viral. There's a lot of companies that have done like stress tests

or some other stunt. Liquid Death, a good example of like, the brand just stood out so much that I'm sure if you ask them, how did you validate the market? Those guys behind Liquid Death would just tell you, well, like we looked at our brand deck that we built and we were laughing

and we knew that it was gonna be good because it was unique and it was just gonna pop. Like they just knew yeah every um uh my wife invested in a company called graza have you seen them yeah which is like a squeeze bottle olive oil yeah and she invested in that company pre-launch and she looked at that being like i know people like olive oil yep they have this like new form factor that was popularized by chefs they're going to to put it into this new form factor and it's going to work really well on social because it's such a like dynamic way to use olive oil. And so that was, and they got to, I don't know what their metrics are. They'll probably do like a hundred million next year, some crazy number. And so, um, you know, sometimes with, with consumer products,

like I've found it's very binary. Like sometimes i look at something and i'm like this will not work they launch it and it flops and then sometimes i look at something i'm like this will not work and it launches and it just rips yeah um and uh timing has a big part to play in it but then you need to look at like what is your edge with the product like with lucy it was like early focus on like the regulatory aspect. With Rora, it was like, let's just spend longer and be more obsessed with design and efficacy than any other company and testing than any other company in the market. And then something like Grazo is like even more simple,

like let's just change the packaging, sell the exact same thing and it'll work well on social. Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean, you should be able to boil it down to some sort of elevator pitch that just makes sense and you have a lot of confidence around. Like what are you doing that's actually different? And if it's just like oh we want to launch this because we think it's cool like you know yeah get out of there you need to be able to articulate also like people that are considering building consumer

products like you need to go into it like yes there if you have a hit consumer product you can scale it very very quickly now like yep fio's like a good example of that. When someone works, like he scales it very quickly. But more consumer products, like company like Ridge, Ridge.com, they'll do like 200 million top line this year. But just operational beasts. But just operational excellence

over almost like a decade. And the first, you know, in like the third or fourth year, it was like a $5 million business, I believe. But it's like, what game are you playing? Yeah, you have to understand, like, are you still going to want to do this product if in the first year you do 500K, the second year you do a million, the next year you do 3 million, the next year you do 3 million, and then the next year you do 10, and the next year, like, are you still going to be wanting to play that game if it's not a rocket ship? And it probably means less venture capital, and it probably means higher ownership for the founders over the long term. You look at the stories of like Red Bull, Monster, like these guys, they grind for years and years and years. And then they pop because they're in a big market.

And they do have the branding and formulation correct. But they own enough to make it worth it. think the real key for those consumer goods companies is like you have to work super extra hard to get the first to get over that first hump where you can actually be taking a salary that makes your life like worth living basically and then once you're flying business class and like covering your expenses your kids are in good schools and stuff then it's like okay well i can grind and compound for a very long time yeah but those first years where you're just making no cash flow and it's just brutal it's just yeah and i think that it's very valuable i think that the category that is is the biggest trap is beverage because people look at a beverage like celsius

and they're like oh celsius is billions billions of dollars a year they're like oh it's so simple i can create an energy drink and it's so went to every single CrossFit gym for like four years straight. Yeah. And did tastings for 12 hours a day. It was laughed at and like product defects and problems and all this stuff. Anything that looks easy, I can guarantee you, it's like deeply competitive and beverage is an example of that. It's like the most cutthroat industry. Exactly. Uh, so we have a new segment on the show, Reply Guy of the Month. Let's go. Let's go. Every month we're going to try and give an award to the biggest reply guy for the show.

So get out there, reply to every post that we make, quote tweet us, retweet us, like us, all on X, send it around. Give us your best replies because you're going to want to win the Reply Guy of the Month. This is a great honor. You're going to want to win. This is a great honor. You're going to be on the wall here in the studio. So this month's reply guy of the month is an intern at Red Letter AI. He's 18 years old. I see great things in his future. He's ex-future founders. He's at the University of Houston studying econ and finance. Love that. He says he's right EAC. Views are my own. And I didn't even know EAC would have, there was like left EAC and right EAC, but cool for clarifying.

He's out in Houston, Texas, and he has a wonderful, wonderful header image of Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, and Tim Cook hanging out together. Amazing. I could see him in that same group at some point, you know, if he keeps accelerating like this for sure and so this month's reply guy of the month is amit uh bless you yeah congrats amit you are the reply guy of the month and he's a great honor i love this about his profile i mean good good numbers for such a young kid he joined in april of 2024 he's only been on x for a couple months he's already got over 1k this is the reply reply guy territory. You got to be the reply guy to get to 1K. Then you can start doing the inside jokes, grind your way up to 10K. Then once it's 10K to get to 100K, it's

got to be the cringe threads. And then once you're past 100K, it's just fake news all the time. He's on the path. He's in some community that's highlighted on his profile that just says the tealists and it's only two members he has like a community it's just like him and one other dude him and his dog his absolute dog his absolute dog like could just be a dm bro but i like that you're published publicizing this yeah he's followed by another friend of the show, Red Bull Futurist. Also a great future. So congrats to Amit. You are the reply guy of the month.

There's never going to be another first honorary reply guy of the month. And to be clear, reply guys is a spiritual thing. You can be a woman. Yes. Whatever gender can be a reply guy. Your thing could be quote tweets you don't actually have to reply it could also just be spamming our dms constantly yep there's a bunch of ways to get here um and there will be many more many more many more let's go to the timeline

and then we're going to start working in some promoted posts uh we because we ran a poll and you guys wanted at least 60 ads in every episode. So we're going to do our best. Try to get there. It's going to take us some time to get there, but we're going to do our best. Let's go to Nicole Wiscoff. She says, the gift that starting from rock bottom affords you is having an insane appetite for risk. You've been there before. You can crawl your way out again if you need to. I like that. I don't know. Yeah, she talks about coming from nothing. What a badass story. Now she's running, what, 50 million AUM?

No, I mean, that's the last fund. That's the last fund, so it's more. Quite a bit more, yeah. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, this just goes back to the Josh Wolf quote, chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. Let's go.

We need a big Josh Wolf quote. Yes, he's going on the mount rushmore of pithy uh thought leaders yeah exactly i love it yeah i think uh the the i i honestly resonate with this so much that at a certain point uh you need to know when to not go risk off but like not continue to risk at all you know because because when you're post yc our burn rate was 3k a month for three people isn't that insane that's amazing because we paid our rent a year in advance yeah we were just like uh just take that out of the bank balance so we don't have to think about it yeah and I think we were like a credit risk. So we were just like, you just take the, and I think our rent in the Tenderloin

in this like complete disgusting hovel of a apartment, it's technically a one bedroom. It had a closet that one guy was living in. I was sleeping in the living room and it was $1,500 a month. And every time I sell something in San Francisco, they're like, oh, $1,500 a month per bedroom.

Like, that's not bad. I was like, no, $1,500 a month for the whole thing. For the whole thing. In San Francisco that like oh $1,500 a month per bedroom like that's not bad I was like no $1,500 a month for the whole thing the whole thing in San Francisco yeah it's like if you're willing to go down to living on 3k a month for three people that can write software and build stuff and just get stuff done and call people just willing to do all of the different problems it's like yeah there's just no way you can be stopped like yeah because you can get 3k a month from so many different places. I think, I think more like it becomes really challenging when you have a family because your kids are in school, like there's like real fixed costs. And I think people don't really recognize that. I tell founders this all the time. Like if you're like, if you're 28 and you want to like start a company and you're deciding well should i work for like this company it's like no like go like so risk on right now because four years from now you're

gonna have a kid or something like that you're gonna be getting married and like your fiance's dad is gonna be like sitting you down be like all right like this startup thing was like cute but like you're about to like marry my daughter you gotta like you know really get it together but more more founders should like raise a fifty thousand dollar angel round and like go live in like the middle of nowhere seriously just like grind and grind and grind and grind i mean my first my first fundraise was seventeen thousand dollars and me and my co-founder made it last six months almost want to made me want to hit the size for a second with the tiny for that a little there you go the tiniest little

size gong uh yeah i mean we made it work like we spent a lot of it very quickly and then stretched it out ever so slightly no i remember running the calculus you know coming to to la being like if i don't make this happen like i have twelve hundred dollars a month to spend yep i have exactly until this date to like be profitable and like be like able to pay myself more. And if I don't, I'm dead. Let's go to Gabby Goldberg. Second time on the show.

She willed it into existence. I think third. I think maybe third. She's a regular at this point. Yeah, she's a regular. But we love Gabby here. She says, Partiful deserves more credit for making random gatherings great again. And it's a photo of the Jeremy Allen White

lookalike crowned in Chicago. There was a Jeremy Allen White lookalike contest, including a toddler dressing up like chefs from the TV series, The Bear. Have you watched The Bear? I have not. I watched the first season. It was pretty good.

Not a huge... TV guy? founders podcasts uh unfortunately no video yeah so i can't stream it but um no i it partiful has gone like extremely mainstream yeah like you have like it just should be a tech thing and like it it kind of proves that like tech is mainstream you can start something and like build it like for the tech audience and then expand out from there i think even like a lot of things like whoop and aura ring were like very like insular like tech community products but um in many ways this is i think we should go dig up like the vc thought part uh leadership of like blog posts like it's time to unbundle facebook right because i think about like facebook events yeah where that was the thing that was the alternative

to partiful and part of all should pick them up and roll that in x should pick up x should absolutely pick up partiful partly because uh i think it would be a i don't think they're monetizing yet uh last i checked and the ce and the CEO jokes about this quite a lot online. She's like, we're just giving this thing away. We're glad people like it. Do you know Paperless Post, which is kind of like the billionaire's partiful, is extremely expensive. You have to buy tokens to invite everyone. They have some sort of digital currency that intermediates things.

Paperless post is like boomer post. And it's so expensive. When I see that, if I'm getting invited to a VC dinner and it's paperless post versus Partiful, I'm like, okay. I think it's going to be some ballers. It depends. It could be some boomers or some ballers. Boomers and ballers.

Yeah, yeah. It's one or the other. Let's go to East Village Guy. He says, why are you, a grown grown man telling me which ap classes you took so he's talking about like accounts payable classes like to learn how to do ramp stuff to learn how to close your books okay um that seems totally reasonable i would love to know what ap classes people take especially if they're going to be working in a finance or high performance a high performance finance or ramp should should actually do more to get into the college curriculum right yeah because that's the number one that's the number

one if you're in ap ap advanced placement accounts payable yeah this is what we need to be taking exactly yeah uh i can honestly say i've never i've never had anybody tell me what ap classes they took it's kind of an interesting thing to know though i wouldn't be mad if somebody told me especially with something interesting. We're, we're, we, we appreciate continuous learning. So if you learn, if you took some, you know, AP dinosaurs class and like you're still obsessed with dinosaurs and now you're getting into dino excavation, expedition. Investing in dinos.

Then that's cool. That's cool. I like it. I don't see a problem with it. East village guy. That's cool. I like it. I don't see a problem with it, East Village guy. Take it easy. Aaron Slodov, repeat guest on the show, says, I'm convinced that basic business, economics, money, education

should be mandatory in middle school. Here we go. He needs to be taking advanced placement accounts payable. And it's a quote tweet from Union Made who says, I worked an eight hour shift today on register and made $168 before taxes. I rung up $3,500 in sales in those eight hours in my little cafe with no seating in South Brooklyn. And so they're kind of complaining. I hope he was wearing gloves for all those receipts that he was touching. For sure. Unless his T's really high.

And then in that case, he should use the receipts to kind of bring that testosterone down from yeah people always say this that like oh they should teach uh you know how to do your taxes in school and i couldn't disagree more i think that you should definitely just be studying like the great books and shakespeare and the ennead and the iliad and the yeah because there's nothing in life timeless education is like a needs to be a forcing function for learning things that you're not going to have to learn in life. Exactly. And most people will graduate school and never think about Shakespeare again when it couldn't be more important. Yes. And there's a million ways to pick up this on the job very quickly. There's so many other resources. There's a million different ways to

consume basic business education through nonfiction. And there's so million different ways to consume basic business education through non-fiction and there's so many great startups that will do your taxes for you I actually very much disagree with this take and I think that schools should focus much more on I think this is a little bit of what's happening at the University of Austin

kind of a return to the classics I mean I have the great book series right there yeah and just facilitating it's very hard to find time to read tolstoy yeah like that's not something that i'm forced to do every april yeah but i will be forced to learn a little bit about the tax code yeah and i can figure that out yeah so yeah i'm i'm fine with going back to and school is like a forcing like like let's force people to do things that are interesting, right? My dad was a high school teacher and he taught a class called Project Make, which was some combination of robotics and programming and wood shop and things like that. And so they would build and launch rockets out on the football field.

Do things that maybe the nerds will do on the weekends, but the average student should be exposed to that kind of thing. Yep, that's great. And schools, you know, have a role to play there. Yeah. So the sales bull says we fire HR and pay the sales team double. And it's the picture of Don Draper. This is funny coming from the sales guy. He's like, give me a raise.

Give me a raise yeah give me a raise yeah uh but anyways usually paying your best sales people double is like pretty good uh good way to spend money um it really resonated 12k likes people are really i'm unsurprised that his following is yeah but i think this is less how much people love sales guys and more how much people hate h. Yeah. Because HR is always seen as like a drag on the company. But, I mean, it's getting easier and easier with more like automated HR tools. Like you can build a pretty sizable company without a dedicated HR person for a long time.

Yeah. You're on rippling and then, you know, it has so many bugs that you want to, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I think you could uh yeah i mean it's interesting that there's not more like there's the the outsource cfo like uh what do they call partial cfos it's weird that there haven't been more of those for hr no there are there are there's because because that seems like much more like in line with like

the startup ethos than bring there's a lot of like three hundred dollars a month you get the software and we'll help you and there's a personal consultant but it's funny because like chamath got like so much shade for being like hr should be like your legal team but like the but like the biggest hr issues that people have like tend to be better suited for outside counsel to like deal with because it's like end up being like extremely charged you know issues with with employees i wonder if there'll be a little bit more of like a a re restructuring of where hr sits in the organization as we go into like the next generation of companies like how a lot of marketing teams have technical people on their staff now like recruiting is obviously super critical in the HR function.

And then the general counsel, the legal staff is super critical. So maybe you should kind of disaggregate it into a finance person that does the compliance stuff. Team building. The legal person, yeah. And then the team person, the team building honestly should just be

an extension of the CEO and the culture. So I would want a CEO's chief of staff to decide we're doing a happy hour because the CEO likes this place and this would be great for the CEO to come and meet with all the employees. And then the recruiter should honestly be living within the functional units of the engineering team

and live right there and be technical. So I don't know. I could see ther function kind of just diffusing without throughout the organization instead of building up like this massive long house in your organization that's good yeah yeah go over our our hr team is over at the long house building yeah you can use the map it's like that would be a good name for the for the outsourced part-time consultancy for hr yeah just like longhouse consulting yeah yeah like let us be your longhouse yeah yeah longhouse is a service uh to says new life goal having a tweet printed by the tech bros pod well

congratulations to it's happened today is the day you got your post printed. I don't know how to pronounce XEAT. I think we live online. Is it ZEAT? ZEATed? We live so online that I couldn't pronounce Cryptox either. Somebody pointed out- I don't even know Tio, Teo, who knows?

Former Dylan who'd been on the show pointed out, you know how you could say like, oh, I'm on tech twitter i'm on you know uh like like crypto twitter fin twit yeah there is not that same language for x sure like i'm on tech x tech x i'm on fin x i'm on fin x it doesn't exist and it's actually a key barrier to growth right now because we all of us on tech twitter yeah uh tech x maybe we just make it tech x tech x sounds like ted x you know yeah yeah really really dumb version i mean the base version's already really we need to add we actually need to add ted x to our enemies list because a bunch of they're smart people that have gone up there, but by and large, some of the worst takes of all time.

The most blue-pilled shit I've ever seen. The worst takes of all time. Oh, did you know cancer was cured every single time? Every year they have someone stand up and say cancer's cured. It's like, come on, it's not cured. We're not there yet. Let's go to Jen over at Andoril.

She says, it's live, andorilexclusives.com. So they did a drop. Andoril. She says, it's live, andorilexclusives.com. So they did a drop. Andoril has selected eBay for charity to host this auction. 100% of the proceeds will benefit Blue Star families. And so did you see this? They're auctioning off pieces of wreckages from tests that they've run. So amazing. It's basically loot crate drops.

There's different tiers. There's rare, rare epic legendary tears and they're not using it as a profit center they're using it to give back uh which i think is really cool i don't know maybe they should be using it as a profit center i think i'm actually pro profit i just think i just am in favor of companies that generate so much so much profit from their core products that they're able to give use that same skill set to give back. And obviously, Blue Star families are fantastic, and it's a fantastic charity.

We love Blue Star families. But I just love that it's a very unique drop. We've been talking about this, how every company has a t-shirt, but only XL Nicotine Pouches has a briefcase and a watch and a Rolex. Yeah. Um, and,

uh, and more, more brands and more companies should lean into understanding like what is the expression of your brand in terms of merch? I was, I was talking to another founder of a, of a unicorn who, um,

I was, I was saying like, like you're, yeah, you're a tech company, but like what, if your tech company was a car, what car would it be? And don't tell me it's a Tesla

because that's what every single person says. I'm a tech company, so the avatar of my brand is a Cybertruck. And it's like, that's fine, but that's also just the avatar of the Tesla brand. You need to express yourself differently. And are you an F-150 or are you a Corvette? Those are two wildly different cars. And you should be able to immediately say based on your brand oh we're more of a corvette

than an f-150 yeah or the aurora systems a porsche 911 of there you go of uh water filters there you go um and so and so this this is a this is a merch drop that feels uniquely anderle yeah as opposed to just a t-shirt which i'm sure they'll be selling and they'll sell other, other merch. But when I think of like the merch that I want from Andoril, I think of like hiking gear, like almost tactical gear, not like fully military stuff you can wear on the range, but something that's like that. And I, and I, and I honestly don't even care if it's just them going and finding a great brand and just like, honestly, just throwing like an Andoril pin on it. That's what founders fund does a lot. They'll,

they give out these bags and there's just a pin on it, but they're really nice bags and I really like them. And you're much more likely to use them. Exactly. And you can always take off the pin if you want. It's not, they didn't have to go and get like some white labeler to like make them a fake version of the bag.

They just give you the actual bag with the pin on it. But it's like the, it's still like an avatar of the brand and it's still, um, an expression, which I think is really, really cool. Yeah.

And brands need to know what they're actually doing with like non core products like merch. It's like, you want to be building connection to the broader community and like likability. Yep. And usually a shirt is not the best way to do that. You can get a lot more coverage

by doing something like this where somebody's like oh i actually own a piece of andrews like drone system yeah exactly blew up yeah it's really cool and i always love artifacts we have a lot of artifacts in the studio here um and a lot of the investors at founders fund have have like a whole set of of artifacts from like oh this commemorates like the spacex deal or the anderald deal and i think that's really really cool yeah i like this too because if you're very online on x and like accelerationist you know defense tech oriented getting a piece like from here would be amazing but they can also go give this to a politician and be like you know throw it on their desk and be like it's paperweight don't forget about us you know

this was blown it's a great paperweight yeah well let's stay on defense tech and be like, don't forget about us. This was blown to pieces. It's a great paperweight, yeah. Well, let's stay on defense tech and go to Ben Coleman. He says, quote, we have a five-star general on our board of advisors. True story. And it's the Inglorious Bastards meme of the guy holding up three the wrong way because Germans do the three this way. You know this guy?

Yeah, yeah. And so it's detecting that you're not one of us and yeah and we know that it's not real because of course you can't have a five-star general right now because it's not a time of war right right right so very embarrassing for whoever did that and yeah what i've seen in defense tech is like a lot of um there's people that will be publicly out there like oh i'm a general and then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities and then they'll use that to like get sort of advisory opportunities and then once they're actually in the deck then they're like whoa now actually like put this like very specific title like oh yeah eighth brigadier blah blah and

it's like ends up being much more specified and it doesn't sound nearly as cool um and so bless their hearts they're sort of like using that like high level title to like land private market opportunities. Yeah. I wonder how valuable having a four-star general is on your board because we, we, we hear stories about some really helpful people like Chris Brose at Anderle like was McCain's chief of staff came in, really runs that organization like full-time employee like very very beneficial um but then you also hear um stories about like the didn't some general join the board of i think mattis joined the board of theranos and like it was like what does he know about that it was it was very controversial at the time and like if you're a board member like

you should know uh i i think that was that was the story of mattis or something but yeah um yeah uh before we dive into the next one on the subject of defense tech we have a promoted post from alan control systems they say looking for a fast-moving high growth opportunity in defense tech we are hiring for several roles across engineering and operations a few of our featured openings are senior mechanical design engineer electrical embedded engineer and an unreal systems developer you can view all of alan control systems openings and apply at alan control systems.com slash company uh numeral sign careers uh improve your links acs uh you guys can do better than that uh but uh anyways fantastic company. ACS is building AI gun turrets and gun systems for counter drone use. So they basically have built a product that can take out, you know, without any human intervention,

drones that are fast moving across the battlefield. And so amazing opportunity. They have their first products is very defensive, but going to save many lives on battlefields across the battlefield. And so amazing opportunity. They have their, their first products is very defensive, but going to save many lives on battlefields across the world. So thank you to ACS for innovating in this space. Thanks to ACS. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, if you stayed in Canada, were you truly that ambitious? Got them. I love, I love some hate on an un-American country like like canada very un-american yeah it's it's objectively one of the most un-american because so close they could so close they could want to be part of this awesome team we want to join up 51st let's come over here i i

would be surprised if canada doesn't try to front run the moon to become the 51st state right yeah does that be kind of like a you know the moon's gonna get a lot of attention once it becomes a state yep and uh you know be the first new state in quite a long time the 50s like a nice round number being that 51st state big opportunity i can see a lot of competition for it uh that's a lot um and canada uh we would welcome you with open arms. I know a lot of friends in the podcast, Jeremy Giffon, Sam Poirier.

Jeremy's from Canada? Yeah. He was at Tiny, remember? It's in Vancouver. He grew up there? He was born there? That's brutal. Brutal. Based in New York now. Thank God. But he grew up there? He's born there? That's brutal.

Brutal. Based in New York now. Thank God. We got a good one. So he is ambitious. He didn't stay in Canada. No, but there's something to be said for like, at the same time, we would welcome Canada,

but I respect all the Canadians that are staying there and trying to make it better and fix the place. Yeah, no, I agree. We love our Canadians. All my favorite Canadians are U.S. residents, but that's also because I spend more time with them. Yeah, exactly. And Shopify, fantastic company from Canada. Fantastic company. And University of Waterloo, fantastic engineering partner. Also good. Lots of respect. And a lot of companies have engineering hubs there. And it is a beautiful country so we love canada uh let's go to unusual wales they say ken griffin of citadel says he's invested in nuclear and it's the future i love these accounts just show they just like say

something that's just like could potentially be like very out of context because it's a big account like it's just like fact ken griffin is a long nuclear uh i want nuclear powered high frequency trading right like i want like i want to be giving these high frequency trading companies these we need to be giving nuclear power to market makers right to to increase financial innovation and the speed at which money moves i actually wonder if energy is a big big issue for the high frequency traders like i know that jane street is advertising on dorkesh patel's podcast trying to recruit i believe cuda engineers and machine learning engineers so they've done a lot of ai stuff but i'm not sure how scale bound they are

right now like a lot of their early stuff was very deterministic. It was written in this programming language called OCaml. Well, and a lot of their strategies were location-based. They were like, how do we get to within 10 feet of where the trade is being executed? You know that on the NASDAQ, they have a rule where even if your server is closer, there's 1,000 feet of cable between you and the main server, no matter what.

So that everyone has a level playing. Laws don't work. So we're going to like physically force this. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, uh,

I mean, uh, it's flash. Probably has a great anecdote about like digging this huge tunnel across probably a good business to be selling commodities exchange to stock exchange. It's probably a good business to be selling those like thousand foot cables because yeah they probably need to be replaced all the time because it's like yeah hey it's too slow great or whatever it's got to be fresh but yeah i mean if

if the if the trading algorithms wind up moving to something that looks like an llm where it's very scale bound like you're going to see huge data center buildouts to it's going to be a new race just like the llm stuff but i haven't heard anything about that we should dig into that more to see i i mean i think at this point he's probably just making the bet on the fact that the llm companies and the consumer ai companies will need energy for their data centers so he's investing in nuclear but this is interesting because you know a year ago people started talking about okay what, what's after NVIDIA? NVIDIA is pumping. Energy is clearly key.

Maybe nuclear is the next thing. But it was very much like a cocktail position. People talked about it, but they weren't actually moving the market. Now the market is starting to move and some of the nuclear stocks are starting to go up. Well, we talked about this before. But they're still not as crazy as NVIDIA. It's worth bringing up again. Four years ago at Hereticon, being pro-nuclear was still heretical. Now it was the most normie take that you could have.

So, yeah, Ken Griffin is just kind of putting a stamp on that. Yeah. Let's go to Sarah Hess, second time on the show. Can't beat these margins. And it's a screenshot of the rare Anduril Relic, recovered crash component from andoril r&d tests and the the bid i mean it hasn't even ended there's still three days in this it's already over a thousand dollars it's pretty awesome amazing and yeah margins are fantastic because

of those families yeah yeah yeah because it's uh you know essentially free since it was just wreckage anyway but yeah i wonder if anybody figures out that like the actual metals, like if you got the right piece, like the metals itself would be like worth more. Yeah. Break it down, melt it down. Some enterprising,

uh, you know, very, you know, they do that with, uh, like, uh,

hypercars when they're, whenever there's a crash, there's a community that will find, okay, yes. Like a LaFerrari crashed in this place. Let's go and dig through the rubble and like figure out if like maybe some random piece got thrown clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Take that and sell it. And it's like a thousand dollar piece. It's like diving for treasure, essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Supercar crashes. It's like a whole community because like if you get one, you know, like clutch or something. Little corner. Yeah, yeah. It would be really valuable because they a whole community because if you get one clutch or something, it'd be really valuable because they don't make them that much or something.

Yeah. That's great. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from Nico, runs a company called Default. 76% of qualified leads book an inbound meeting with Default. We try to help customers think of demo requests as ones who fall into two buckets

demo qualified and two not demo qualified most of our customers only show a scheduler to leads who qualify for a demo uh so nico's building an amazing platform uh an enterprise product called default that helps other enterprise companies uh you know sort of like sort and qualify and book demos. So he's been at this for quite a while, backed by Kraft, and now is starting to see some pretty fantastic results. Became buddies with Nico a few years ago at this point, and their execution has been fantastic. So if you're dealing with processing inbound leads go over to default hit

up nico dm him uh on x and uh he will get you he's the kind of guy that if you dm him right now he'll jump on to do a demo of the product with you like in like five minutes well if you're demo qualified if you're qualified so uh he'll qualify you that's part of his his uh his job and what default does so thank you to default let's go to val he says something that would let us buy and trade seconds from future ad slots would be lit and so he's uh he's pushing us to uh let the average viewer and fan invest and profit from our future ad spots so that's actually kind of interesting like if you want to if you want to go long technology brothers you should be buying up our 2026 q4 inventory and then reselling it when the time comes that's great uh so yeah maybe uh somebody

wants to create a platform market for this yeah we'll we'll we'll potentially have like a dynamic auction yeah yeah where it's like we could be doing the show live on Spaces and there's a bid right now. Or like, oh, we actually got a higher bidder. Hit the printer. Hit the printer. Print it out. Yeah, yeah.

You can buy, if you buy the ad slot within, it's kind of like a car auction where after the two-minute thing gets down, if nobody does it, you can buy the slot. But then you buy the slot and once it's physically printed, it's locked in. Yeah. The price is is a lot yeah he was saying he wanted to uh invest and i said would he prefer a spac or a shit coin or both i think both at the same time hasn't been tried yet not really but uh could be a new kind of experimenting with liberty coin liberty

social social he's kind of got both yeah yeah and then also lots of merch drops we might he doesn't do ad reads though yeah he should he should have an ad product i'm actually so state of the union so can you actually brought to you by my pillow is there something is there a reason that trump has not done his own podcast because the guy clearly likes this is the future i'm telling you the future is the president will have a podcast the president will have a podcast 100 we should create a polymarket for that well like will Trump have his own podcast by 2027? Well, I think J.D. will. And I think J.D. will bring on his associates

and whoever he's thinking. Think about all the buzz that's been happening around who's going to get Department of Transportation, who's going to get Commerce, who's going to get Defense. And the way these people are introduced, it's usually a screenshot of a press release that goes viral yeah we're like who's this there's like a couple mainstream media

write-ups and then a video clip will go right we'll go viral from whatever that person said on some other podcast so like they'll be like this is the new secretary of defense like so based or so terrible depending on who is posting and it's just a clip from them on a podcast but how much cooler would it be if you could just watch you know trump or whoever the president is sit down with yeah the person say hey american people i'm thinking about this person for secretary of transportation we're going to talk for an hour and then you're going to roast them roast them in the comments yeah roast them in the comments but trump if trump had his own podcast he could get that podcast to a hundred million dollar run rate just on ads oh totally uh which would be which would be a hundred times the run rate of

truth social and maybe he could take it could be the first podcast to go public right he could and then you could just have like you could just be you could just have all of America own a piece of... So anyways... I mean, this is the thing. Didn't Churchill... No, it wasn't Churchill. FDR did the Fireside Chats. Those were really popular.

Well, you know how there's like... Voice to America, weekly things. I think even Obama did stuff that was like weekly dispatches. Yeah. About like, here's what's going on. Well, I feel like these are less of a thing now but isn't there like presidential accounts for there's like there's an x account that's for the first lady yeah when you're the first lady and there's donald j trump yeah and at potus changes hands exactly exactly so trump's like i'm not gonna blow this like if trump if trump was

actually on the at potus account just ripping yeah bangers that account he's like i'm not gonna 10x this for my future like for somebody who's gonna use that audience against me like in like four years yeah um i would i would love to listen to a podcast i could see jd i could see jd like booting up at potus again though and i mean i think uh vivek ramaswamy is gonna do it because he's already doing vlogs and he clearly understands like the modern media stuff. He's buying BuzzFeed. He can use all the BuzzFeed, you know,

resources to kind of craft his own media strategy and really level up from there. Let's go to John Fio. He's been on the show before. The Fiorentino family. Made their money in... Hospitality.

Oh, hospitality. He's quoting Tony segura who says president trump at real donald trump is requiring vote volodymyr zelensky to wear a coat and tie when he meets the president going forward and john says in the same way you weren't trusted if you didn't show up in a slouchy hoodie to a meeting in the last 20 years, we're about to snap back to suits as a filter. Speaking my language. Speaking our language. You'll want to make sure you're wearing a Fiorentino label soon because he has a suit

company. So John came in very clutch at Hereticon. I didn't have time to get my own suit sort of ironed and dry cleaned at the hotel. So I was able to wear a Fiorentino label suit. It was fantastic. Got a lot of compliments. Turned a lot of heads. That's great.

And it was all thanks to the fine fabrics and fit of his label. But yeah, I think it's kind of funny that you remember these memes where if your VC is wearing shoes like this, they they're going to like try to buy 50 percent of your company or like if your VC like is even wearing a suit at all, like you're fucked, you know. And I think that like trends obviously oscillate from one side to another, like very dramatically. And it became like the thing to wear like all birds and joggers and like hoodies. And and that so clearly is just like wrong. Yeah. Right.

It's the same thing when you have over 50 million at AUM, you need to wear a tie. You were, you called me like very upset the other day because you sat down in business class on a flight next to somebody and they were just dressed like very sloppily. Yep. And you were like physically ill from just being like in their presence saying like this is so wrong you should know that if you're flying business class you should be wearing at least a collared shirt at least and um you know we hope that we're on the forefront uh you know with people like fio uh and you know our own podcast we hope that we're on the forefront of a new movement in tech to just like dress uh dress for the for the yeah for the job

so if you see a tech a capital allocator out there in casual clothes maybe on a podcast just send them a nice note in the replies just tell them like you know love what you're saying love your business model but would it kill you to put on a suit exactly exactly let's go to josh capital allocator not a hvac technician exactly let's go to josh mill You're a capital allocator, not an HVAC technician. Exactly. Let's go to Josh Miller. He says, I've said before, and I'll say it again, from antitrust to AI agents, 2025 will be the year of the web browser. More and more signs by the day. Interesting.

So I think this was in response to news. I think that there were actually, yeah, Chrome potentially being forced to spin out, which is potentially very wild just because Google is so, and all of Google's products are so deeply integrated into Chrome at this point. It's hard to imagine a Chrome that's not, that's sort of like account agnostic. It's probably not that hard to build, you know that alphabet has spent alphabet's strategy was like hey like search is our golden goose let's build up these sort of like walls all around it via android via chrome so that like we have we're building up this sort of like fortress and uh if it gets spun out that'd be cool like chrome has probably billions of users. And the perplexity CEO was joking about buying it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, which would be funny. Very funny. Which would be a great scene of the simulation. But yeah, Josh and the browser company, it's called the browser company for a reason. They were set up to innovate in this area. Oh, he's the CEO of the browser company? Yeah, yeah.

Oh, that makes sense now. Okay, got it. Yeah, so they built a fantastic browser. They're now focused on building sort of agentic browser products. Got it. They haven't shared a ton yet, but it's products that will browse for you on your behalf. Well, then this is kind of interesting because just recently they said that they were kind of pivoting away from Arc as a core browser product but he's still very bullish about the web browser broadly. He just wants to find a different

way to integrate. So here's what the browser company needs to do. Find a SPAC. There's like hundreds out there. SPAC. Buy Chrome. And suddenly Josh doesn't have to compete with the big bad Chrome. He can just be the Chrome. I wonder how much Chrome is worth. It's probably not

cheap. Because if you buy a standalone business i mean i'm pretty sure the isn't isn't the deal for doesn't google pay apple like that's what i'm saying so you buy chrome and then you license just to be the default search engine on yeah yeah yeah that's 20 i thought it was 20 billion yeah so think about chrome's got to be like almost in a similar install base size and maybe even more valuable or somewhat valuable. So like you have $20 billion of essentially infinite, just net income.

Like you run a multiple on that, like it's a $200 billion asset. Like something in that range, like it's a lot. It's not two billion. It would be a big SPAC. Yeah, it's going to be tough. I mean, I guess they could just do like a demerge and just have two tickers and

they're just, I think that that will, what it would, it would be have to be, but then what isn't then the new companies, like if they're beholden to their shareholders, isn't the most profitable thing that you could do. Just go relicense a product back to Google

like you're talking about. Yeah, that's exactly what I would do. And if you can't do that, then it's worth way less, right? You'd have to look at like Mozilla and some of these other big browsers and be like, well, what is this actually worth? Yeah, very interesting.

Let's go to Jason Carman, a fantastic filmmaker, a good friend of mine and of the show. Jason says, most people don't realize how big of a deal Starship is. Ahead of today's Flight 6,

here's a first look inside a new series I'm working on called Frontier Films. The first one is all about new space. And this actually got reposted by Elon.

Big. I mean, it's amazing. Jason has crushed it and he's making, like, the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now. No, if Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, hey like the documentaries are better than Netflix stuff now.

Like it's funny. If Netflix is smart, they'll go and say, Hey, the next series you do, they should just give it to HBO. Honestly. Yeah.

Yeah. Because, um, no, he's on that path and it's honestly the path that all media is going on to get, to actually break into traditional media and like get the Netflix or the HBO or be on TV.

You gotta do, you gotta be big online first. Otherwise like you just don't understand attention and like it's just too risky. Yep. So Jason is, and yeah, I think like he's carved out his own niche of like, I am a filmmaker in technology,

which like the fact that when you think filmmaker and technology, I think of you and Jason. And in many ways, like you were like a YouTuber, right? More of a YouTuber. He's like filmmaker, multi-platform. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, his whole background is filmmaking. He's, I kind of like chose YouTube because it was some white space. Like a lot of people had sub stacks and I was like, I want to do something different. I like, I'm kind of a camera nerd. This guy's been like making films his entire life, dreaming of making films and so uh super excited for where he's going with it and it's funny because there is already a netflix documentary

about spacex but it wasn't made from the perspective of someone like jason who's actually worked inside of a space company at astronis and really gets it and really talks to the founders and the investors and understands the whole three so it's just going to be so much better and you just know that it's going to it's going to to rip. And he has a whole, he has a whole bunch of different products now. Like he started with the S3 series doing these like kind of micro company deep dives on like pretty early stage companies. Um, but they were really, really polished, really great interviews. Then he did his interview series. Then he also did some flashback stuff where he did bell labs and now he has these frontier films and so he's he's like fully

building a a new movie studio essentially like truly going into and showing like how efficient it can be like he doesn't have some massive production company well it's because he's actually an individual contributor like he knows how to use a camera he knows how to use a microphone like he doesn't need to spend you know a hundred thousand dollars on every single thing because he knows how to do it himself he can do it solo but then that allows him to hire the best and so and last it's gonna be he embodies the technology brothers true mentality which is doing it for the money right he's doing it for the love but like this guy is going to make millions and millions and millions of dollars making important films pushing humanity forward through you know he's basically a marketing

channel for a lot of really important companies. So thank you to Jason for doing what you do and doing it for the money. Thank you, Jason. Let's go to Gary Tan. He says this company went from zero to 500k ARR in the last eight weeks. Lots of people do AI due diligence for private equity. But this is the first one that outputs all the analysis natively in Excel files that analysts slash principals can understand and modify from formulas up. And it's a repost of YC congratulating one of their portfolio companies.

Yeah, so this makes a lot of sense. Like anytime you can go after, like this company is replacing people that today make between like 80 and like $250,000 a year doing like just like keyboard work, like modeling. And it's one of those things like it will probably, maybe already is or very soon will be,

better outputs than like the humans that would do it. And for like a 10th or like, you know, even 5% of the cost, something. But importantly, it still allows you to have a tunable model at the end of the day. It's kind of like, what was that company that Tegas bought that was, it was Canalyst, I think it was the name. And Canalist would allow you to download a DCF that was kind of pre-populated with the metrics.

There's always been Excel templates for various public companies. You can get like a CapIQ or Bloomberg integration to pull all those formulas in. But allowing a company to do this in the private markets with just like the proprietary data. And so much of the work is just scraping stuff out of differently formatted PDFs, differently formatted Excel sheets, just doing the translation. And that's where AI is like so valuable right now, just taking a bunch of messy stuff

and copying it over and cleaning it up. Like that's where AI really, really flourishes. Yeah. And if you're an analyst or an associate and you're worried about AI taking your job, you should be looking at this being like, no, it's not going to take my job. I'm just going to do more deals. Before, it might have taken you a week to build this model or 24 hours. Now, you're going to be able to build it and get on to the next one.

It's just going to increase the velocity. It's everything that we're seeing in art and filmmaking where you can accelerate with some AI-generated music or some AI-generated content or where I fill in the background. There's still artistry. There's still going to be creativity. Yeah, you're making a deck and you need the right image for a certain slide and you just generate it. Exactly.

And it's going to be the same thing with building these models. you're just using this to fill in all the annoying problems that you would normally have to grind at for nights and weekends. And you can grind on nights and weekends on more deals. More deals. We love that. Let's go to Pavel, Dallin's brother. He says, Very misunderstood by tech outsiders.

A low-intention meeting with a successful person is net worse for you than not meeting with them at all networking is default harmful makes you look like an npc unless you have a clear agenda that's a good point never heard this yeah so anybody that meets deli and go oh you're pavel's brother so do that yeah pavel's his own man uh but but anyways yeah i think people don't there's this obsession in in tech of trying to climb the ladder and, oh, if I just meet this person and get in the room with them, I can do something. And it's like people even use cold email to a fault. Use cold email when you have a specific thing that you're trying to do with somebody or you have a specific way to add value to what they're doing or something you can offer them or something you can ask just it's a total waste of time to like meet people when there's no thing to do together exactly so like don't nobody wants like people in tech are generally like friendly open to you know outsiders whatever it's awesome but don't like waste somebody's time by just being like hey i'd

love to talk it's like nobody wants to just talk we want to do things navall talks about this like what like you have an extremely high opportunity cost there's that idea that like you know your coffee meeting should be worth like ten thousand dollars yeah and and it's okay to come in with like hey look i have a i have an opportunity that together we could make a million dollars is one percent chance that it goes through so yeah this is this is a ten thousand dollar meeting as opposed to just like i want to just pick your brain and figure it out. Yeah. It's also important to understand like if you're, if you're at a conference and there's like somebody like a bean air there,

right. And you're like, Oh, I really want to meet this person. There's going to be like 20 other people like crowded around that person. And you have to understand that all those 20 people are like kind of making that, that person's life worse because they're just coming at them with just like a

bunch of bullshit. And it's better to just be like, you know know not approach them then and cold email them or get a warm intro months later and be like hey you know we overlapped at this conference didn't get a chance to talk social proof right there that you were in the right room and then you can launch into your like i'm building this thing i'd love to like run it by you and that's going to be a lot more effective of like actually building a relationship than just like you know coming on to them and being like oh i want to be friends yeah and there's something like a fine line about like being too transactional like only talking to someone when there's something to yeah but i always i always talk

you know i was talking with uh sebastian um fromi yesterday. And I told him something that I believe pretty strongly is like, if you're a busy person and the person that you're meeting is a busy person, you're only going to spend a lot of time with them if you're actually working on something, right? Like the best friendships are usually founded on like something per doing something productive together. And so I don't think it's wrong it's not even necessarily transactional but i don't think it's a bad thing that there's a lot of people in my life that i'm like if i work on a specific deal or company or even in this situation we spend like 20 hours a week hanging out and we we wouldn't be doing that if we weren't making this podcast

and like there's nothing wrong with that like we were friends before and we're friends now, but, um, it's great to find reasons to be friends. Yeah. Let's go to Liz Wessel noted angel investor in ramp. Wow. Secondary to that.

I think she's a general partner at a big venture capital firm, but that's cool too. Less important than just ripping an angel check into ramp. She says, why do so many people become investors slash partners and suddenly grow enormous egos? It's so obnoxious. You're not the only one who's special. Your founders are. I mean, I got to disagree with you there. Yeah. I mean, you're incredibly capital allocators are very special. Imagine if all the capital allocators in the world just ceased to exist. Our entire global economy would come crashing down.

Yeah, we always say that the working class gets far too much credit, and so does the founder class. There's so many with businesses that are R&D intensive, they cannot exist without. So I don't care if a founder has a pretty deck or a good idea or a great pedigree. If they don't have a $5 million seed round, they're never going to achieve their dreams,

which makes the venture capitalist absolutely critical to the process. And they should have a colossal ego. I don't think you should have a big ego if you have like a micro fund, like $400 million or something like that. But if you're getting up into the the billion dollar aum range like build that ego up yep you're just as important you know as like

jokes aside there is something very valuable about being a young founder and interacting with an extremely high ego investor because at least there is some alignment there most of the time so you can kind of get some reps in deal with some sharp elbows and deal with like it's almost lower stakes then then dealing with a high ego public company CEO who's gonna buy your company or something like that like you've gotten the reps in and just realized like what what a big ego is and how to deal with it and but yes obviously it's a little silly especially if you haven't actually earned it and you've just become a partner because of your career. I tell, I tell

there, there's a specific investor friend of mine who has a few billion AUM and he like high, like hides a lot of his like material success from his founders. And I'm like, dude, you realize that like people want to work with other winners right so like if you're a winner and you're crushing it like other people that are already winners or want to be will want to work with you yep so i don't i think it's important to just kind of like shatter that wall yeah and yeah obviously having a huge ego is like not like there's no there's no need for that yeah but i do think that ego is an edge and we went through a period of business history where ego like go ask like michael ovitz like

hey like what do you think you know did you have a big ego when you were building caa and he'd be like yeah it's what drove me every single day yeah but the key is to have a big ego and be kind yeah of course of course there's also a big difference between like materialism and like having nice things and having a big ego like those can be very different you can have you can have a hundred thousand dollar watch and still have an appreciation for a really interesting casio that costs a hundred bucks right and being and being a someone who who uh understands like taste and yeah and uh an opinionated decision making even and not just saying oh like this person has like a really expensive hublot yeah that's not going to cut it right no so yeah the other thing is there's a difference between you can have a

huge ego and still be very respectful so a gp that's managing billions of dollars, they can have a huge ego because they're managing billions of dollars. They can still be respectful of founders, respectful of their time, kind in when they pass, you know, or kind if, you know, and respectful if there's a tough situation. So the key is to build, build the ego and, you know, become a better, kinder person. I really wonder who this subtweet is about it's clearly about some investor partner someone who just made partner on like you know for no reason and is now just like running around being like you fucking work for me yeah yeah uh hopefully it's not happening at her fund um buco capital bloke he's been on the show before he says i heard someone say here for the income

not the outcome today at work and that pretty much nicely sums up what happens in tech when stocks really start ripping 2021 vibes everywhere with 1k lights yeah a lot of people have been talking about i mean just the general we're just we who knew when when 2021 and 2022, early 2022 were happening, it didn't feel like we'd reach that level of frothiness again for at least a decade. And we prayed for a bubble. Like, how many hours were we praying to have another bubble and to get AI this quickly and in many ways get, you know, there's even a bubble in tech podcasting, right? No, but I do think it's this thing where these companies get to a certain size and suddenly it's become so hard to sort.

Like I was talking to a founder today who's thinking about starting his own company, you know, interviewing and would likely get an offer with OpenAI. And he was looking at it as like, well, I could go to OpenAI for a year, invest like a couple million dollars of stock and then be an open AI shareholder and then just build my company. So that's like the reality of like here for the income, not the outcome. He doesn't necessarily, like, he's just getting it

as like a call option, basically mercenary. Um, but he's going to start a company. So good. That's great. That's great that's great let's go to Megan Niveau first time on the show she says so once a zempic gets to be cheap will rich people start being fat again so you know how it used to be a status symbol to be overweight like in the early you know I have a joke with some of my friends when when they get fat we say looking prosperous looking prosperous looking prosperous yeah so the real contrarian move here. Yeah, Peter Paul Rubens painted fat people, and it was a luxury.

It showed that you had enough income to afford nice foods. Yeah, and so the real edge of your capital allocator out there, add pronouns to your bio, and get overweight, and you'll really stand out and kind of make a statement of,

like, I am contrarian. Yeah, for sure. I wonder if there will be a future where just like we discovered this miracle pill in Ozempic, there will be a miracle pill that will allow you to be extremely obese, but suffer none of the health consequences. That that's alpha. That's alpha. So you can just be physically intimidating. Yeah. Walk walk around at 400 pounds. You're having to go to Patek and get like customized like bands because like it doesn't fit around your wrist. Yeah. I do wonder. Have you been through like a heavy like mass gaining period?

Many times. There was a period when I first started going to the gym when I was 18. I would eat at the college cafeteria three times a day. I would wake up, have a protein shake, go to the gym, go to the cafeteria. Then I would get two peanut butter sandwiches that were bread with a puck of peanut butter. It was like a burger size. And I would eat two of those before lunch. At lunch, I'd go back to the cafeteria, eat a whole meal. And then I get two more sandwiches and then I would go to dinner and then I have one more sandwich and one more protein shake. So I was like literally having like 5,000 calories a day. Like it was just absurd. It's fantastic. Um, and

everybody should go through that. It's character building to go through because you're every single bite. You're like, I'm going to throw up. Yeah. I feel sick. You got to go through prosperous, look prosperous, everybody prosperous, everybody. Prosperous. And then go through a cut, convert all the muscle, and become a mass monster. Mass monster, size lord. And then take a Zympic and get peeled and walk around at 5% body fat. Yeah. We have a huge move in the talent world.

This is actually massive. Fred Ursham, the founder of Coinbase, is welcoming Jeremy Barinholtz, who doesn't have an X account, sadly, as a co-founder of Nudge, link to his post below. And so Jeremy Barinholtz is a former Elon Musk associate at Neuralink, and I had the pleasure of meeting him, and he was truly one of the most impressive people I've ever met. An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. Really, really incredible. And not just building an alternative to Neuralink focused on, you know, improving. Yeah. It's a non-implanted device. So I think it's a headband that improves memory or something with the brain, interacts with the brain in some way electrical stimulation but um fascinating fascinating guy went to stanford um was in the military and i met him and he looks just like the typical like san francisco like thin programmer guy and he was telling us that he's like extremely goal-driven yeah he sleeps for like two hours a night insane and i. And I was like, this is fake. Like there's so many red flags.

Like I just don't buy this guy, what he's saying. And he was like, no, I'm extremely goal oriented. Like when I want to work on something, I just work on it constantly. And if I sleep, I'll just wake up and be like, I need to keep working on this. It's insane. And he was like, yeah,

one time I got really into working out and I got in this incredible shape and I looked like a professional bodybuilder. And we were like, yeah, right, dude. Like you're so skinny. Like this is impossible. And he showed us a picture and he was like the most jacked dude I've ever seen. It was insane. Amazing. Insane. And so he just, he was working with the FDA stuff. He's electrical engineering, working on neuroscience,

working on programming. You can go look up his GitHub. He's written a bunch of programming code. Like he is totally the real deal. Like really fascinating person and so huge i hope uh i hope he leaves his mark on the like i'd love to just put on the nudge headband and just like get some you know even like yeah 60 percent of that like yeah you know mindset it it it really he really is like a special special person like i i i left being it was a it was a big, like it was the Founders Fund CEO Summit and there are a lot of very impressive people there. But he was someone that really, really stood out as a very, very interesting,

like long tail person. Yeah. And I was very bullish on him. So very excited to see what he does. And I hope we learn more about him. He's very quiet and he was featured in one Ashley Vance article about Neuralink.

And hopefully there's more because I think the way he thinks about artificial intelligence and math and everything, it's like extremely valuable. And there's not enough of this intellectualism that actually boils up. He's a very, very interesting thinker. So rooting for him. Big pickup. Let's go to Andre. He says, a preview of my new book, pre-order for $39.99. And it's two screenshots. It's how to build generational wealth on x.com. And the first page is you can post the plane with red dots.

You can quote tweet anything with this picture of the plane with red dots. It always does numbers. Even if people have no idea what it means, they will like and retweet to feign that they understand what's going on. And I think I replied to this, but I would actually read this book. I think it's amazing. Yeah, yeah. There are so many of these formats.

And he should charge more. He should charge more. He should actually do it, or he should do at least a huge thread of all the most viral slop. I do think, yeah, viral slop. It's the iPhone. This is the best feature Apple

ever made and it's filling in the text message two-factor authentication code. And the book could come with a link to a Dropbox where you could download all. But they're not like high-res. They're all reposted like burnt-in JPEGs that are super compressed and grainy.

No, I do think this is, there's a lot of people that go on X and just start like posting and just like otherwise like very intelligent people that just do not understand how the platform works. Sure, sure. And like couldn't for the life of them like create a banger even though they have good ideas.

Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, this could be like, you know, a book, a cohort-based course, like in-person events, summ get on yeah three get on wap.com get some wi-fi money going yeah yeah there's a 360 degree business to be built here i think so uh and you'd help a lot of people get uh post economic just from posting i think so i mean we've seen some of those creator paths they get pretty big yeah yeah pretty big um Yeah, yeah. Pretty big. You can fund your whole startup on it.

Let's go to Keshav. He says, Paul Graham's whole life. I need money to paint. Learns programming. Falls in love with Lisp. Works briefly at Interleaf. Starts Vioweb to fund his painting lifestyle. Sells to Yahoo for life-changing money.

Moves to California, then New York. Tries painting. Can't focus properly. Feels lost. Discovers writing essays online. Creates YC. This is temporary. Then I'll paint. Builds Hacker News. Gets stressed, discovers writing essays online, creates YC. This is temporary. Then I'll paint.

Builds Hacker News, gets stressed running online community, leaves YC to paint, tries painting in 2014, gives up mid-painting, codes Bell for four years, returns to essays and Lisp, moves to the UK, quote unquote, for a year, never leaves. It's so many people like this where it's like they they have this this idealized passion of themselves like what they could be but they're just like born to allocate capital or born to post or born to write or code and he just clearly has so many so many fantastic skill sets uh pg yeah yeah painting was always a fever dream but thank thank god it stayed a fever dream because otherwise we wouldn't have y combinator and uh we'd live in a world where if you made a good app, you'd never have 50 competitors launching next year. And you wouldn't have 50 VCs lining up to write your seed checks. You never would have gotten the safe. You never would have gotten the two on 20 seed round.

Think about the impact he's had. I mean, I always think about YC as more less of a less of an investment vehicle like they've had to impact on the investing space obviously but yc has become essentially a union for startups yeah because if you are a vc and you fuck over one yc company you go in their database every yc company hears about you and instantly you're ostracized from the entire community and such a large community and the collective bargaining approach of going everybody goes out for two on 20 it's like that's just the price my friend it's funny you say two on 20 because like when i went

through it was like one on 10 and then it was like one and a half on 15 and now it's two on 20 but even back in the day with one on 10 that was probably felt like people were like well this is like egregious 100 it's always been it's always felt egregious. It's always felt egregious. Yeah. Yeah. We'll know the money supply has expanded when, when YC companies are going out where they're like, yeah, we're going for out for 10 on a hundred. There was one company in my batch who raised at 80 and everyone was like, wow, this is wild. And there's always like one company. I don't think they actually did that well, but their numbers were crazy. It was like this company Virule.

They did like viral videos and I think they had a ton of revenue. Because the guy who did it had been building like online advertising tech since he was a kid and had like a bunch of like, just made a lot of money through like online advertising. So he was able to get the business to like a pretty big size.

Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friends over at Ramp. Why settle for individual ingredients when Ramp gives you the full financial operations sandwich? They have corporate cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, travel. Look at this sandwich. It looks fantastic.

We haven't eaten yet today. Oh, it looks fantastic. It's making my mouth water. And it is a great way to articulate like the value of ramp that like it's the CFO suite. It's a bundle of tools. It's a, you know, it's a compound startup. It's multiple products all wrapped up in one. But my problem is that I don't think ramps a sandwich. I think it's a nine course prefix with a wine pairing at the French laundry. I think it's, I think it's premium.

And, and when I think of ramp, I don't think just some sandwich that your, your mom made for you and threw in a plastic bag on your way to school. I think, you know, begging for a reservation, greasing the Mater D,

valet parking, your turbo S, walking into the French laundry, shaking hands with the chef, sitting down and enjoying an omakase. Totally. So good post, but step it up with the classiness because I want ramp to be a premium brand. Yeah.

Their social media manager is fantastic. Always good for a laugh. But yeah, nine, nine course meal, one pairing. And the chef will even, you know, the chef will even you know the chef will even come out and say hello kareem will send you a note and say thanks for being a ramp customer this is true eric will send you a note eric really is the ceo that eric will come and sit down at your table and you know have a conversation and make sure that your your your nps score is i've always said that about the way Elon runs X now,

where if you have a banger, he will come around and just drop a crying face emoji in the replies. And then it'll break your phone. Yeah, it'll break your phone. But it feels like the chef coming out and being like, is everyone enjoying the meal? Is everyone enjoying the bangers today?

Here's what's going on. And I just love that about the way he uses the product because no previous CEO, not even Jack Dorsey, uh, who was like totally in founder mode during his whole career. Like he didn't use the product that way. And Elon really used the product where he clearly consumes the stuff and comes out and is like, Oh, is the soup good tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, like, like, let me have some of this whiskey too. Like we'll share some of this. Like is the wine working? Oh, it's a little tonight? I'm tasting it. Oh, let me have some of this whiskey too. We'll share some of this. Is the wine working? Oh, it's a little cork.

Let's adjust the algorithm. It's good. Adjust the algorithm. And I think the Ramp guys are doing the same thing. Let's go to Logan Bartlett. He says, MicroStrategy has now passed its dot-com bubble stock price and is an $82 billion business. Get him on the podcast, Logan.

This is an $82 billion software company. You interview the largest public company tech CEOs. You got to get Saylor on the pod. Get him on the pod. Get him on the pod. No, MicroStrategy has a fantastic business model. For every dollar of Bitcoin they buy, they get $3 of enterprise value. And so if they're smart and they're serving the shareholders, they'll just do that over and over and over forever. Yeah. And then if Saylor's like really bullish,

he'll do a take private at a nice premium because he's just like, I'm so long, I'm happy to pay, you know, 3X for the Bitcoin because I could use more leverage on the take private. Oh my God. Yeah, it's wild um there i mean the funny thing is that there are a number of companies that have done this exact chart akamai do you know akamai the networking company they invented like uh like ip routing

and stuff is like this mit company fascinating and they were worth like 20 billion during the dot-com boom a couple of the guys sold they only worked there for like six months during the dot-com boom, a couple of the guys sold. They only worked there for like six months during the run-up. Just became generationally wealthy. And then it took the company like 20 years to build back up, but it was a solid business with solid technology, and so they finally got to their peak more recently. A little bit of a different story with MicroStrategy,

but respect, respect. At least having that up and down, you get a nice, you know the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect, right? Yeah, respect. At least having that up and down, you know the number that you have to hit again to get any level of respect. Yeah. We go to TCP Tech CEO Pepe. He says, daily affirmation, I will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile. I love this. I believe you'll be able to do it.

Although the ICBM might not be holding a nuclear weapon inside of it it might be a might be SpaceX point to point you might be riding on that you might be going from New York to Tokyo in 30 minutes but ICBMs I saw another post SpaceX is just a wrapper around ICBMs

I like that make the ICBM useful again we need to be firing these things off. They can't just be sitting on nuclear submarines doing nothing. I know. Total waste. Total waste. Yeah. You can just, you know, in the same way that you can just do things, you can just manifest things and you can just affirm things. I think it's a very, you know, it's been well studied to this point. Like you should be leveraging this in different ways, but don't do it in the ways that, that, uh, you know, that, that people in LA do it where they're like, I am healthy. I am happy. I am like, I step it up, you step it up. You know, I will,

uh, find the a hundred million dollars hidden in my computer. I will find the a hundred million dollars hidden in my computer. Oh, speaking of that, let's go to Atlas creatine cycle. Uh, it's a screenshot. It says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in your macbook your job is to figure out how to get it and he says there is a hundred million dollars stuck in sf your job is to break up with your gf move there with your best friend and start a gpt wrapper yes let's go more wrappers there aren't enough wrappers there are genuinely, genuinely just go. If you don't have a good idea, just go make it, go make an app in the app store called chat GPT chat.com GPT or something like that. And it's just chat GPT reskin put in the app. No, it's not even

chat GPT is llama probably. Yeah. Yeah. And just charge, just charge, charge the most, have some, you know, put it. Put some good branding on there. Spend a ton of money on paid ads. If you spend a dollar on paid ads and you generate a dollar and one dollars of revenue, just keep doing that forever until you're a beaner or a centi. There's nothing stopping you. You don't need to be that creative. You just need to work harder.

Yep. I love it. Thanks, Creatine Cycle. Always good to have you on the show. Let's go to Isaac. Isaac says, this time two years ago, my timeline was filled with business banter, hot takes, bad takes, random shit posts. Now it's crickets. I came to Twitter for business shenanigans and more and more it feels like it disappoints. I won't be leaving, but I hope it changes. Well, I mean, you're disrespecting X by calling it Twitter. That's your first mistake, Isaac.

Yeah. Also, be the change you want to see in the world. Why don't you start posting business banter instead of complaining? So Isaac is a friend and fantastic entrepreneur. He actually made his first million selling swords online. Oh, sick. Okay. He has a company called Mini Katana that he bootstrapped using these like crazy viral hacks on YouTube making original content.

He's now building a candy company. I think that Isaac, I've said this before, but he's really like the Willy, like he's the next Willy Wonka. Awesome. So if you have all the VCs out there that have like a Willie Wonka thesis, go find Isaac. Uh, his company's awesome. Uh, his facility where he manufactures everything is like only a few miles from here. Uh, but yeah, I, I, I haven't necessarily experienced this, like the four year page, like definitely it's a little messy, especially during the election. But that's why we're doing the show. It's messy. There's a lot of slop.

But that's why we're doing this show. Follow Tech Bros Pod. We are posting business hot takes. We never post bad takes. A lot of random shit posts, but there's a lot of content. No social commentary. No political commentary. We never talk about politics. Purely business and technology.

Exactly. And so the comment section, even on this post, when we quote tweet this, there's going to be a lot of hot takes. Anyways, good to call this out, but use the not interested button. When they try to put some slop in your For You page, say not interested. Block, mute.

Not interested. It does require curation. You're building a Zen garden. You want to avoid some things. I mean, I have a series of lists now. I often look through the For You page a little bit. I find that the first 10 posts are usually pretty good. And as you go farther down, it just gets sloppier and sloppier because it's just randomly sorting. But then switch over to the following tab. Got some good people in there.

I also have a list just for the people that I know post great stuff. I want to see everything that they post. So I put that in there. Also, just spend more time online. That's probably the problem. Do we have a promoted post? Promoted post from our friend Jackson Dahl. Jackson says, I'm excited to announce Oh, this is big. Dialectic podcast, an interview podcast

with the sharpest, most creative and original people I know. He says, I like to spar with people on their ideas and push them deeper ultimately to understand what makes them themselves. He's already got episode one out. He's got a cool, uh, graphic here.

And Jackson is somebody that has, uh, one of those people where you talk to like very high, like in insights per minute, right? So if you're having like a 10, 10 minute conversation with him, you're going to have like a bunch of interest. He's going gonna give a bunch of interesting point of point of views and take so

uh the podcast is awesome listen to a little bit of the first episode um and uh anyways very uh i think this is just like he he's one of those things it's very strong like uh founder market fit in the context of like a podcast like looking at this as like a media business like he's gonna have um no problem just like making the show fantastic is he monetizing already that'd be my number one risk factor for maybe we should be the first advertiser maybe as much as we like to um juice our show with ads like we should be advertising quite a bit so jackson uh if you don't have any advertisers yet uh we'd love to uh make something happen let's go to adam graham first time on the

show he says the amount of high quality content the tech bros pod is putting out is insane banger after banger this is why they're they're the most profitable podcast hell yes adam let's go this is exactly why we do everything that we do. We do it for the money. But if there's bangers as a byproduct, then that's fantastic. Yeah. And high quality content, if that's what makes the money, we'll do it. But just to be clear, if low quality content is more profitable, expect some low quality content. Here and there. Yeah. But

good to have you as a fan. Good to have you as a follower. Good to have you on the show. Welcome to the Tech Bros community. Thank you. Thanks, Adam. Thank you, Adam. Let's go to Nick Carter. He says, locked in and pulled another all day or today. Let's go, Nick. Let's go. The only time I've ever taken naps during the workday, like, I was, like, probably, like, devastated. Like, I've had to be in, like, a really bad spot. Yeah. To be so strung out. I take, like, one nap a quarter on, like, a Sunday.

Yeah. And it's wonderful, but I'm not a daily napper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of crazy. Yeah, naps are, I get it if you're like Paul Graham and you're working on your painting career and you're trying to get like a, you know,

burst of energy for the afternoon. But I don't know any. Also, it's kind of impossible to take naps when you're on enough stimulants to kill a horse. That's a big, that's a big part of it. I think anybody's like, oh, I should take a nap.

It's like try caffeine. Try 600 milligrams of caffeine and four milligram nicotine pouches all day long. There you go. You won't be inclined to nap. You'll be pulling all-dayers every single day. All-dayers daily. But I love Nick. Quintessential you can just do things guy.

Did the boxing match. Did the investigative journalism. Huge capital allocator. Love Nick. Amazing. Does a bunch of cool stuff. Fantastic. Student of capitalism. Let's go to my colleague Bridget Harris over at founders fund She's she's quoting Peter Thiel says the Wall Street banks are long the trade deficit because the bigger the deficit the more money they make

And she says obviously bigger trade deficit equals larger volume of cross-border payments stable coins could be hugely helpful here in helping smaller banks compete with cross-border flows. Large banks have no incentives besides defensive to switch because of this dynamic. Lower fees equals less profit, among others. Has to be a smaller player slash new entrant with nothing to lose plus favorable legislation because the incumbents won't cannibalize themselves unless pressure comes from the outside. And love you, Bridget, but you made a terrible mistake. You included a link to Spotify, which is banned on X. And that's why you only got 99 views. So turn this into a clickbait thread. Repost it.

I'll retweet it. And we'll go to the moon. We'll cover it again. I think you got 1,000 likes easy on this if you just make it a little bit more incendiary you need to call someone out piss and they're the reason america's stagnating this is the problem you got to be much more aggressive but honestly a very thoughtful post and something that really digs into all of the features of stable coins and all of the different uh factors going on there i was not aware of all this but it makes a lot of sense yeah there's it's it's going to be interesting with stable coins so far it seems like the fees uh you know stripes obviously

made their move into stable coins we'll see like what the you know i've seen like some stable coin products that just still have like similar fees to like traditional payment processing but it'll be a pretty cool experiment to run to just be like all right if you can move money basically for free in this sort of trustless way how much does that accelerate the velocity of money and i would imagine it'll be pretty significant yeah i mean it still seems like we're pretty early in all of the crypto stuff like even bitcoin it's unclear like is it putting pressure on certain parts of the u.s government like it's become a political issue and there's pro-Bitcoin or anti-Bitcoin communities, but we haven't really worked through because we're not on the gold standard. If Bitcoin

displaces gold, how does that really trickle through the rest of the American economy? Well, now there's rumors of the strategic Bitcoin reserve. That would be big. Yeah. Very interesting. But Bridget has a fantastic post on pirate wires uh deep diving the uh the stripe acquisition of uh it was a bridge yeah it's confusing because bridget and bridge but uh the stablecoin platform that got acquired and so you should definitely go read that if you want to learn more about stablecoins let's go to the founder of Perplexity. He was demoing a new Perplexity product for shopping, which I love. You can just take a picture of something and then Perplexity will go and find the product that you're searching for. And in this case, he asked,

what watches does Jeff Bezos wear? And Perplexity helped him realize that Bezos is often wearing the Omega Speedmaster Professional Moon Watch and another watch. And he says, should I buy this? And I think the answer is absolutely you should buy it. We need more technologists and founders who are watch guys. We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic FP Journe. We know some capital allocators who are rocking Pate We've seen this happen with Zuck. He's rocking a fantastic FP Journe. We know some capital allocators

who are rocking Pateks and Nautilus and Aquanauts at this point. But it's still under-discussed and there's still major alpha in getting into the watch game. It needs to be more a part of the conversation. Exactly, exactly. So I highly recommend this.

You need to differentiate. You're in brutal competition with every other big tech company, bro. You need to stand out. Get a nice piece. Stat other big tech company, bro. You need to stand out. Get a nice piece. Statement. Get a hitter. Get a hitter.

And then every time you go and shake someone's hand, when you go shake Jensen's hand for those GPUs that you need, he's going to be like, ooh. Even people that aren't watch guys, they're still going to notice and respect it. Exactly. It's a way to make an impression. Yeah. So I say pull the trigger. And it's a way to make an impression. Yeah.

So I say pull the trigger. Let's go to Yarden Shafir. He says, I'm outside the club. A drunk girl is yelling her opinions on Rust. I have hit peak San Francisco. Wow, 7K likes. There we go. Tech is mainstream.

People like Rust. I've never written a line of Rust. I know it's a very popular language really popular with crypto i think i'd really appreciate it if people can stop being transphobic in my comments go do that someplace else if you must yeah of course this turned into a culture war issue uh it's more it's more as soon as anything anything past a thousand likes it turns into you're in the dark a culture war zone. Dark X. Try to keep your likes under 1,000 if you don't want politics and social issues.

Yeah, you want low-tam bangers. Just the people that know. Consistent. Or else it's going to get to you crazy. But yeah, I mean, this is interesting. Because sometimes the drunk girl outside of a club, I remember in Miami seeing a drunk girl talk to a bouncer about Bitcoin and it was right at the peak when Bitcoin was at 20k and then it immediately sold off afterwards. So there is a little bit of like when your barber is giving you stock or your taxi driver is giving you stock tips

like maybe that's a signal. But this is a signal that SF is back. I think so. The fact that somebody went out in San Francisco presumably past 10 p.m. is a really bullish sign. I wonder if that's real or if that was just like an imagined scenario. You can just make up things. You can just make up things.

Let's go to Beth Jezos. He says, Bio-ac is the next Overton frontier. Few. Yeah, so you've been a strong proponent for literally years for genetically engineering bears to domesticate them and also make them allies for us. And also biohacking and stimulants

and all sorts of stuff in that world. But yeah, it's interesting to see where this goes. What's interesting is the Overton frontier, is he just saying that is where the political issues are being fought right now, like over IVF, over what Noor Siddiqui is doing at Orchid, over genetically engineering babies, like that type of stuff? Because Overton, I usually think of the Overton window as what is acceptable to say politically.

So it seems like what he is saying here is maybe that there are things that are going on in the bio-accelerationist community that you can't talk about or you would be canceled if you talked about. And this is like the rumor that there are genetically engineered children

in China right now, but not in America. Have you heard this? And so it's interesting that it's like maybe we're going to have to have a national conversation about the morality of bio in the same way that we have had it around AI. Yeah, there needs to be a conversation.

There's certainly – I could get on the hat for this. Put on the tinfoil hat. But there's many people – one of the sort of pushback against this, there's many people that that uh lyme disease was created in a lab really because it basically spread out of this small area around um like long island sure there was a there was a island off of um like montauk area interesting and dogs would wash up on like in montauk that were like a dog combined with a pig. What? Like very weird. This is the most crazy. Very, very weird stuff.

But Lyme disease also spread out from sort of like that was the geographic center and the ticks that initially had it were sort of spread out from, from there. I'm terrified of ticks and Lyme disease. Whenever I'm on the East coast, I always avoid going for hikes and stuff. I'm like huge West coast. I always avoid going for hikes and stuff. I'm like not a fan. Huge West Coast alpha like having less ticks.

There's something scary about having something so small have such a huge impact on you. Like spiders and snakes. I'm not a fan. Anyway, hopefully we'll hear some more stuff about biological accelerationism. I think we need a good blog post from somebody.

I mean a little bit of that's happening with Neuralink and probably Nudge and a few other programs. So putting all that together into kind of like, we need like a packy deep dive or something. Be cool. Some things just need a packy deep dive. They do. Jeff Lewis says,

I believe that in the future we'll be governed predominantly by algorithms. Phase one, algorithms accumulate power, 2000 to 2020. Phase two, governments attempt to wrest power from or align themselves with algorithms, 2020 to present. Phase three, algorithms become the government. So Jeff has a special talent for looking at, you know, there's phrase like how do you how to predict the future is to like sort of like look at the the present right and in many ways like he positioned this tweet in a sort of like incendiary way of being like 2000 to 2020 right algorithms gaining power yep um but uh

but yeah i you know i i i buy this i feel like we're like we're already seeing the governments align themselves with different algorithms. You saw that this election cycle. But I would just say I want to live in a world where the temp check algorithm runs the country. Vibes-based governance. And Jeff, we've told you this already, but bring back temp check. We need it. Some of the best VC content market. I know you're not a VC.

Fantastic. Best VC content marketing in the game. It was fantastic. Classics and some low-tamp bangers in there. Yeah, this is kind of the Brian Johnson question right now. He's been asking a lot of people. He says that don't die is an algorithm and that's what he's really creating. And also he's been asking a lot of people like if you could guarantee that an AI would give you like a better life outcome, would you submit to the AI dictator? And it's a very interesting

philosophical question that I think we'll be digging into more over the next few years. So definitely the right question to be asking. Go to Matt Turk. He says, okay, but we dramatically improved our podcast game. And it's a response to TechCrunch. In 2023, VCs returned the lowest level of capital to their investors since 2011. And so 2023 was not a good year for venture capitalists. But there were a lot of great podcasts that came out of this era. Actually, I would say that in many ways, maybe the carry checks were lower, but big funds were still being raised. The fees were high.

The fees stayed stable. And so why not put those fees into a Shure SM7B or some cinema cameras or a lovely set? Why not? But yeah, we do need more venture capitalist podcasts. I've noticed this when I've looked at like, if you're a VC or a company and you want to go do a press junket, it's actually pretty hard to go do 10 solid interviews

that have a reasonable following. Like if you're a celebrity and you're promoting a movie, you can go do Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert. Like you can do, you know, NBC and CBS and, you know, The View and all of these different things to promote your show. And they all have large followings. And on, in terms of like VC world, there's really not that much. There's like a few shows that are pretty big. A lot of them don't have guests. It's not like you can just call up all in and go on. 20VC does this. There's the TechCr don't have guests it's not like you can just call up all in and go in and go on 20 vc does this there's the tech crunch one but it's not like you're gonna go and get these sort of like super influential hosts yeah and it is really important for for

founders to be able to like work their way up and start with a smaller show and then parlay that into the bigger show and then wind up on the big show but it's really the same way that tech founder donald j trump finally was able to claw his way up onto rogan yeah yeah exactly and there needs to be a similar path but it's hard because dwarcash is so focused on ai and lex occasionally i mean he had the cursor founders on but he hasn't i don't think he's even had palmer lucky on there's like, there's not really that many just general tech shows. Like Logan Bartlett, a great show, but it's like now narrowed down

to just like public company, SaaS CEOs, which is cool. Yeah, and that's why we started this podcast. We felt like the technology industry needed a podcast. It did, it did. Let's go to the real estate god. The real estate god says, craziest thing in America is that the average person could 2 to 5x their salary simply by taking a sales role,

but they're too scared of people telling them no 20 times a day. Interesting. That's true. It's funny. Sales is one of those things. In a lot of things, if you're getting told no 20 times a day, you should just stop doing what you're doing because the market is telling you like you're doing something wrong you're doing something bad like it sucks but sales is like one of those things like the

the no tolerance needs to be uh extreme mostly because like sometimes like even customers that want your product like don't want to deal with you right now or they just have 10 other things that are more important so you're never going to break through someone else shared something recently that was like oh in the future i forget who posted this but in the future you're going to be getting 2 000 email like perfect cold emails a day from all the outbound sales agents and salesforce is going to be like taking you out to like a steak dinner and And they're like, so we're going to renew your contract. We're going to increase it like by like 50%. Like here's, you know, just sign right here.

And you're like, all right, like I guess this is what we're doing. That's fantastic. Let's go to Jen. She says, overheard three tech bros discussing how much money it would take for them to replace their girlfriend. Thing is, none of them even currently have a girlfriend. Boom. Roasted.

Roasted. Got him. Technology brothers, tech bros, get girlfriends, dude. Figure it out. Get girlfriends. Yeah, don't let people overhear you talking about embarrassing things. Although, could be imagined. Could be a fake overheard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You never know happens you never know it's a proven that goes in the how to post bangers how to create general you know uh red bull futurist exemplifies what a technology brother is yes he's over here talking about wanting to have 10 children right so he he can't there's nothing like no AI girlfriend, friend.com is not going to replace having a loving wife and partner and mother of your children. Until there's some crazy bio-accelerationism

and some artificial womb. Yeah, we're domesticating bears. Artificial wombs. Let's go to Jenny Fielding. She says, a pre-seed company that raises a modest round should not be burning more than 50 K per month. This is a hill that I'm willing to die on. Well, you're going to die, Jenny. There's money to be made, but this goes back to your $17,000 pre-seed. Oh yeah. If we were burning 50 K, that would be one week. We'd be out of money in one week. One week.

Yeah, I think this is the challenge with venture, right? Money that is raised gets spent. And it's ridiculously hard. One of my portfolio companies just raised around basically off of a lot of momentum. there's already this like oh we could hire this person like this person's amazing and look what they're going to do and then suddenly this company will have added like a million dollars a year burn that they don't really need or maybe they could have pushed it back uh you know down the road um so yeah this is where like yc is like dogma is just absolutely correct which is just like keep burn incredibly low.

And it's so hard, you know, as somebody who started a company in 2021. And I never even realized that YC PG wrote this post and I believe it was called don't die. Yeah. And now Brian Johnson's using that in the, in like the literal sense, but the original PG thing was just don't die. Don't out of money and as long as you do that and you stay an entrepreneur eventually you'll figure it out yeah i have i have there's a company that that i backed in 2021 and uh the uh only three people invested in the company yc or i invested in one other guy invested in yc did their their round and they've pivoted like 10 times but all their updates are like we pivoted again and it's like monthly burn like runway and it's just been going it's

been like 8k a month burn plus like server costs and their runway has just been like dwindling down like very slowly but they've taken so many shots like i'm eventually expecting to get an update from them it's like we have 10 million of ARR. Like we pulled it off. I love that. But they would have had way less shots on goal. Yeah. But I mean, seriously, it is difficult to create an axiom around burn rate. Because if you're doing something that's R&D intensive, or you're going to spend a lot of money on lawyers, or you're acquiring a domain, or if there's something weird going on, like it's going to be very bespoke.

Some companies are completely justified in burning a hundred K a month out of the gate. And some companies shouldn't be burning more than 10 K out of the gate. It just really depends on what you're doing and who your team is and where you are. Um, but in general, I agree. You should be conscious of your burn. So great. We certainly are at this podcast. And let's end with one more promoted post and then we'll go to Lulu. This promoted post is from DuPont registry. DuPont has a 2024 9-11 GD3 RS. This is not the first time we've had DuPont as a promoted post and not the first time we've had a GD3rs on here this one is a painted sample pastel orange

that comes fitted with custom 1016 industries carbon fiber kit this car looks fantastic uh we eventually will be doing a trans continental uh race yeah as technology brothers, probably with a ramp-branded car. Yeah, a GT3 RS. Probably a Gumball 3000. Gumball 3000. Maybe the Dakar as well. Yeah, so there's a few big races coming up in our pipeline, and we're certainly going to be – I'll be driving a Porsche. You might be driving something American, but that will be –

we'll each die on that hill. Yes. But anyways, fantastic example. Thank you to DuPont for- And how much is it? It's listed at 490,000. Wow, an absolute steal. An absolute steal.

I mean, at that price, you can't afford not to buy it. Yeah, they're basically giving this away. Yeah. I would make sure to get your PPI because, I don't know, pastel orange PTS, this could easily get into the 500s. But thank you to DuPont. And I mean, if you're an entrepreneur, then you can pick it up.

But if you're a capital allocator with some small $400 million fund, that's a no-brainer. No-brainer. No-brainer. Let's go to Lulu. She says, taste aside, from a purely strategic perspective, this brand marketing is disastrous for Jaguar. For context, Jaguar sales have been plummeting down 70% in the U.S. in five years. Did you hear that they took a year off of making cars? They just are not making cars for a full year

because they're completely resetting. Up to 2018, Jaguars are actually growing quickly, doubling sales in a few years. And she breaks down all the disaster that came from this post that was called Copy Nothing. And it was a very abstract ad. It looked like a, I don't know, like a music video almost with a lot of interesting characters. It got a ton of attention. And I think Lulu's post got more than the Jaguar post. In terms of likes, Lulu got 16K on this. And she kind of breaks down the problem that Jaguar used to be the iconic image of an old-school British gentleman.

Think Sir Roger Moore. It was James Bond level car. And then they kind of messed around and wound up with kind of shifting from being in the luxury and classic sophistication market competing with Bentley and Aston Martin. And then they shifted down to premium competing with BMW and Mercedes in a more crowded market. But Jaguar SUV sales are cannibalized by their own sister company Range Rover. And now they're not upscale enough to compete in the luxury market and not

cutting edge enough to compete in the premium market. Yeah. So they have to reset. They need to focus on the cars. Yeah. They have this vicious cycle where you have lower sales, which means you can invest less in R and D and you're not even producing parts at the same scale, which means that the parts end up being more expensive for you. And like, it's this crazy vicious cycle.

And then it almost feels like this campaign is, uh, not like a nail in the coffin, but how do you, how do you completely turn off an entire new generation of automotive enthusiasts where I've never once considered buying a Jaguar, except every now and then you'll see a Jaguar is leasing, and they're like, we will pay you $1,000 a month to lease this car. They can't give these cars away. They stopped making cars for a year because their sales were like basically zero yeah like car people don't realize like sales volumes on cars are like are not even that high like the aren't the way most jaguars yeah the way most are jaguars maybe

way most should just buy them buy yeah at least they can make cars yeah because they say you can make cars like the end of the road um yeah that that seems like the end state that's that's the only time you really see a jaguar but but if i saw something that wanted to revamp the brand they shouldn't have done this crazy video they should have hired someone like who hyundai hired who was the former developer of the m label at bmw and he created the n group at uh the performance group of hy. And they're creating like insane cars, like the Ioniq 5N. Have you seen this? It's like the fake noise

and like all the car guys love it, even though it's electronic. Even though it's electric vehicle, it sounds like a V6 and it like shifts like a V6 has this fake DCT in there. And then they're also doing this crazy Envision car that looks like a-

Yeah, super nostalgic one super nostalgic, super nostalgic. And so there are a bunch of ways that they could have gone into the vault and brought something back that stood out and made a statement as a car. But they just chose not to. Maybe this would be the start of something new, but it was a very weird brand direction. And it doesn't know it did. Somebody was commenting and I think this was accurate. Like it's almost like they were expecting like a Kamala win and they had invested like tens of millions into this campaign and they were just like,

all right, we already made it. Like we bet the house on this and then everybody's like, no, like you realize that like Trump won. Right. Yeah. But we don't talk about politics on this podcast. So we will leave it at that Jaguar could be a good acquisition target for us at some point

the history of the brand aligns with a lot of our ethos so somebody will bring it back sometimes it just takes an extra decade thanks for watching subscribe or else you'll be relegated to a life of flying on net jets ouch

have a good one bye